This studio approaches painting as a disciplined realist practice grounded in continuity, structure, and perceptual rigor. The work is presented for collectors and institutions seeking depth, durability, and historical coherence.
Painting, for me, is not simply an act of representation but a philosophical inquiry into how meaning becomes visible. Classical realism provides the structural grammar for this inquiry, not as a historical style to be preserved, but as a living framework capable of engaging enduring questions about truth, appearance, and being. The tradition I work within is an ongoing conversation that extends from Plato’s suspicion of images to Heidegger’s understanding of art as a site of disclosure.
Plato’s critique of mimesis raises a fundamental ethical challenge: if images can mislead, then seeing itself must be disciplined. My practice responds by treating realism not as illusion, but as attentiveness. Through proportion, tonal structure, and restraint, painting becomes a means of clarifying appearances rather than multiplying them. The goal is not to persuade through spectacle, but to cultivate a mode of perception grounded in care and deliberation.
Aristotle’s defense of mimesis as a form of knowledge further informs this approach. Art, in this view, reveals universal structures through particular forms. I understand realism as interpretive rather than duplicative — a process of distillation in which composition, value relationships, and measured gesture extract coherence from complexity. What is represented matters less than how relationships are ordered and sustained.
Later aesthetic thought, particularly Kant’s emphasis on reflective judgment, underscores the importance of sustained attention. In an accelerated visual culture, painting offers a counter-temporal space where perception is slowed and refined. Craft becomes a means of resisting distraction, allowing form and meaning to emerge through duration rather than immediacy.
Heidegger’s conception of art as a place where truth “sets itself to work” offers a final orientation. Painting, for me, is not illustrative but revelatory — a process through which something is allowed to appear through constraint. Each work is an attempt to let form, material, and perception converge into a moment of disclosure.
Ultimately, my practice is committed to continuity not as preservation, but as participation. By engaging classical realism as an active philosophical framework, I seek to contribute to an ongoing investigation into how we see, how we know, and how meaning can still be made visible through disciplined attention.
On my deathbed, I would want to know that, like A. E. Backus, I returned again and again to painting not for recognition, but out of fidelity to seeing — trusting that a life spent in sustained attention was reason enough to make the work.
