During the last decade, I have used snapshots as a starting point for my work. Instead of painting from found photos, I have sometimes bought anonymous (unsuspecting) customers' snapshots, made them into paintings, and then returned the photos of my paintings to the original owner. Some of my shows are titled in reference to this--such as "Second Set Free". My goal is to force the unsuspecting viewer to re-examine the casual photograph. Painting still has the aura of the carefully examined handmade object. This can become threatening when applied to private images not meant for public perusal. Through that shock of invasion, my hope is that the viewer's mind is open to the changes made in transforming the photo to paint. These changes erase the literal details which are often the substance of the snapshot and replace them with formal qualities emphasizing composition, surface, material, and color. I never change the composition of the photo or alter its subject matter, but I enhance the abstract qualities of the image in an attempt to make it beautiful. Hopefully, the unconscious appreciation of that beauty will leak through, while the mind is occupied by the horrors of the affront.
In this way, I parallel the role of early proponents of Modernism such as Alfred Barr, who believed it was their job to "enlighten" mass audiences to the formal qualities of paintings and ignore their literal aspects. This was not recognized as a hostile act in the past, but it has been portrayed as imperialistic and condescending in more recent times. Now painting's penance is to constantly acknowledge it is just one more image in a world of throwaway images. I passively attempt to turn this around by reworking the most throwaway of those images (snapshots) and pushing whatever life there is in them out to the surface.
