My wife and I were between houses and living in an apartment for most of the year. I didn’t have room to work at a large scale and make a painterly mess with oil, so I got a couple of great watercolor sketchbooks, some acrylic paint, and started in.

What an incredible experience making over 100 of these pictures. I first began making sort of traditional collages - layering paper and affixing it with glue and marking it with pencil - but the process grew and grew. The surfaces became repositories of my lived experience: they turned into accumulations and excavations of elements that I found on my walks, or in the daily rubbish. I loved the way different kinds of packaging paper I used responded to being pulled and bent and glued.

Somehow the accidents of living were revealed and obscured on these surfaces, and sometimes I”m moved by the beauty that emerges from these commonplace materials as they warped into their own precise, unique shapes. They became something I have been trying to get to for so long, they became objects. They are their history, the history of their becoming. These pictures have life in their forms and I feel it every time I hold one and by looking at it I am pulled into its revealing surface of time.

Here’s a look - on the right - of how they feel as specimens of life - like the bejeweled, encrusted, beautiful insects by the entomologists of yore.