A single painting can take me months. I don’t mind that. I paint in oil specifically because it refuses to be rushed. Every canvas moves at the speed of its own drying time, layers, and care. Everything else in this generation is built to be instant. A message answered in seconds, a feed that never stops refreshing, a version of connection that asks nothing of your time. Oil paint asks for all of it. It forces a kind of patience I don’t naturally have, and I’ve come to think of that slowness as its own quiet protest against a world that’s stopped expecting anyone to wait for anything.

 

My work sits in the lineage of the Baroque. Caravaggio used darkness structurally, letting most of the composition disappear so the light picks out only what matters. Bouguereau sits closer to my own process. His idealized figures were built through patient, methodical study and pencil drawings accumulating toward a single goal. Gottfried Helnwein pushes that same discipline into hyperrealism until the precision itself is unavoidable. There’s no expressionist brush stroke to hide behind, you’re forced to look. Phil Hale’s figures stay fragmented and unresolved on purpose, suggesting a story rather than finishing it. Brian Flynn works through his own family’s history in Ireland by layering and disfiguring the figure, protecting an identity while erasing it at the same time. What draws me to these artists isn’t nostalgia for an old style. It’s the way they use darkness structurally. Chiaroscuro isn’t just a lighting technique in this tradition; it’s a way of deciding what deserves to be seen and what stays suppressed. I use that same logic. The empty, unresolved space in my paintings, and sometimes their scale, are meant to carry weight the same way the figures do. A kind of pressure that sits in the room with the viewer rather than just depicting it.

 

I paint people because I’m fascinated by them, not as types, but as specific, complicated individuals. There’s a certain privilege in taking the time to paint people. You end up brushing their history, their triumphs, their defeats, in a way that a quick passing interaction never allows. That’s become harder to find. I think a lot about how much of todays life is mediated. How people increasingly perform themselves for an audience, rather than simply existing in front of one another, and figurative painting for me, is a direct answer to that. It’s slow looking in a culture that has mostly stopped looking. It’s built entirely on the kind of real, unfiltered encounter I think we’re losing.

 

Thematically, my work returns to feelings that don’t get much room in ordinary life. Melancholy, doubt, the private weight people carry and don’t often name out loud. I’m not interested in resolving those feelings or prettying them up. I would rather sit inside them long enough to understand their shape, the same way I sit with a painting for weeks before it’s finished. If the work reads as heavy, it’s not accidental, it’s an attempt at honesty about states of mind that are usually kept offstage.

 

Ultimately, I think painting is one of the last places where a person can leave something real behind. Made slowly, by hand, without an algorithm deciding who sees it. That’s what I’m after, the work that says, plainly, someone was here, paying close attention.