In grad school, I did a series of pieces I considered witty social commentaries, abandoning the focus of my earlier work - drawings of friends and family. After struggling with these new pieces for a while, one of my professors put it bluntly: “The problem with these is that they’re like one-liners. And once you get the joke, who cares?” I went back to painting my friends and family. Since then, the familiar has been my principle realm. My cast remains those around me, and the stage, that space we all share. Some of the issues I’ve explored have been the nature of relationships, community, and our personal environments - especially that psychological space we all construct for ourselves. Art at its core must be a spiritual journey: discovering what is most important to us. We usually hide this knowledge from ourselves beneath insulating layers of the pseudo-significant, because to truly know is to confess that we fill our lives with mostly trivial things.