I don’t really like to make general, sweeping remarks about my work. I feel as though I’m always searching, trying to find a way that expresses a subject in a way that matches how I personally feel about it. Because of the transitory nature of this exploration, a definitive statement about myself as an artist feels like a task that is beyond me and so I will not attempt to make one. What I’d rather do is talk about the two works that I have provided for this exhibition.

Both pieces belong first and foremost in the realm of the portrait. They attempt to portray a faithful likeness of the sitter and also to convey something of their personality. Everything is exactly as we would expect if it were not for the accompanying still-life on the reverse side. It seems strange, at first glance, that two works would be painted on the same panel thereby permanently linking the two images. However, linking the portrait with an image on the verso has its origins in the very beginnings of portraiture itself.

Besides sculpture, coins have borne some of the first portraits we know of. And of course, they have usually been accompanied by another image on the opposite side. It is also of note that the god Janus is credited in mythology with the invention of minting coins. Janus is represented as having two faces looking in opposite directions, one looking forward and one looking back. Supposedly this represents the two centuries in which he exsisted and also that he is simultaneously looking both forward into the future and back into the past. The portrait serves to do this for the sitter. It carries on their memory after they have passed allowing them, in a sense, to exist both while they live and after they die.Over the course of the 15th century in northern Europe, the portrait took on further developments becoming not just the privilege of kings and emperors. With the rise of the merchant class portraits were commissioned on a much wider basis. This, however, clashed with some of the virtues of the time and portraits became suspect, like mirrors, as things of vanity. To counteract this, humanists, and painters like Memling, began to include images in a form of self-criticism against false pride and illusion. Usually this was in the form of a skull, the universal form that is hidden beneath the mask of every individual.

I have attempted to continue along these lines. This work is intended to capture an individual at a specific moment in time. The verso is meant to urge the sitter to contemplate who they are, who they were, and who they will be. And as witnesses to this, it urges us to do the same for ourselves.