christian poet.
13" x 12".
wood, paper, charcoal.

british poet.
12" x 12".
styrene, wood, paper, charcoal.

a boy.
5" x 4".
wood, paper, charcoal.

w eugene.
15" x 10".
wood, paper, charcoal.

noel coward.
7" x 5".
styrene, wood, paper, charcoal.

sad nun.
12" x 6".
styrene, wood, paper, charcoal.

son of f. scott fitzgerald.
13" x 8".
punch cards, styrene, wood, paper, charcoal.

painter.
7" x 5".
styrene, wood, paper, charcoal.

At the time I was living in downtown San francisco, right on the cable car line and a few blocks from the twisty part of Lombard street. Living in a neighborhood that attracts people from across the globe can make you thinks lots about the aesthetics of your existence. Your eyes are processing the same information as your visitors but you are having completely different experiences. I became obsessed with a book I found on the sidewalk by Dean MacCannell called "The Tourist" and for a year or two I was fascinated with ideas about existence not only manipulated by aesthetics, but also a viable definition of existence that ended at aesthetics, with nothing deeper. Obviously I was also smoking a lot of marijuana.

At the same time I had become pretty good at charcoal drawings and I especially enjoyed portraits. My stuff was technically good but lacked the sophistication of much beyond a first semester at art school. So I thought it would be an interesting experiment to manipulate my simple drawings to look like more, and since I was in a very specific mental state at the time, these pieces inevitably became an attempt to parallel some of my thoughts about a purely aesthetic existence into art. To the extent that these pieces are about anything, they are about concealment, artificiality, and manipulation-cornerstones of the San Francisco experience. Not that they are about anything.