About Chris
Born in Fayetteville North Carolina. Earned BFA in Painting Drawing from East Carolina University 2004. Earned MFA in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2006. Painting and drawing studies abroad in Feltre, Italy. Cultural studies in Costa Rica, Greece, and Israel. Currently resides in Denver, Colorado.
Artist Statement
My work is about organic, lived experience: I crumple sensation and perception into thought and effort; I write “ordinary” phenomena as meaningful expression. The translation process is full of strife. My ideas and the media I use to convey them evolve to one another, just as riverbanks alter the currents of the waters that weather them. The patterned drawings in my work bear witness to steps and missteps taken to make the work work, just as the fossil record preserves evolution’s failures and triumphs. By incorporating sketched remnants of “false starts” into my finished products, I transform the flotsam and jetsam of my creative process into meaningful chronicles. Routines, habits, and cathartic distractions are barriers between our world and us. I aim to reconfigure our truncated perceptions so the overlooked real becomes real again. Feel waves of heat from rising steam; hear rainfall in clustered sheets; see trestle bolts tremble in the wake of passing freight. For a moment forget deadlines; bills; obligations, and experience the world as a live creature.
