A number of years ago, when I had begun to think of myself as an artist again, I was confronted with the problem of what to do with my limited time in the studio. I didn't have any concrete ideas motivating my work, no real axe to grind, so I developed a practice which allowed me to remove myself from the business of coming up with the meaning behind my paintings.

I cobbled together a little computer program which selects a random artwork from The Harvard University Art Museum’s collection and generates an image from the colors contained within it according to some rules that are applied by chance. After running this program multiple times, I end up choosing an image to paint. I try to recreate what the program created as faithfully as I can. The titles for these works are generated at random, too, from different texts such as stories by Borges, poems by Nostradamus, or an essay on poetry by Tolstoy.

My paintings are relatively small (easel-sized would be an apt description) because I like to imagine everyday people living with them in domestic spaces.

I find it interesting that meanings can be attributed to the results of chance operations. My paintings take advantage of this in the same way that a Tarot reading does. Though the interpretation may not be true in either case, it is sometimes nice to believe that we can access some esoteric knowledge in the midst of random occurrences.