My Butterfly Year 2022 32”x24”x2” Acrylic and colored pencil on panel My uncle Mike who passed my senior year of high school mailed me a copy of The World Of Art the year before he passed. He’d seen it at a used bookstore and came back every week for a month or so until they had marked down the price enough to afford it. He wrote great letters and the book had post it notes with commentary he’d left on slips of wax paper so it wouldn’t damage the pages. It’s a prized possession of mine and I’ve been lucky to be able to flip through it and read his notes over the years. — Including certain objects in my compositions feels like a means of sneaking multiple portraits into a painting without other human figures. In this way it’s an imbuing of a scene with countless others, both living and passed in the same way that those others shape the world as I move through it whether or not we’re in the same place physically.