"One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 60's and early 70's. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs.

The hyperrealist genre is clearly more than an attempt to replicate the mechanical action of taking a photograph."

ARTIST STATEMENT

This particular body of work is not simply about perfection in imagery. Nor is it about the craft of merely duplicating photographic representations. By contrast, it is a compendium of paintings which function as a new simulacra.

My photographs are utilitarian source references. They serve as a foundational framework from which to work. Significant changes to the images are made during months of painting and drawing. Ambient light, shaded spatial color, compositional balance, atmospheric perspective and altered depths of field are introduced in the work, wherein resulting illusions of scale, depth, movement, shadow, etc., transform the image into a convincing reality.

Merging provocative visual statements with photographic references is a means to an end, rather than the end itself. As hyperreal paintings, these works often elicit a visceral core response from the viewer. As existential representations, they are an expressive continuum of my perceptions as a lifelong New York artist.