Night Paintings
I paint in oils, (often outside and often at night) in my neighborhood of Logan Square. These landscape paintings are inspired by the Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon. He wrote that Chicago “was built not for people to come together, but for them to be safely apart.” He argued that in an attempt to build individual freedom, privacy, and independence into the urban landscape, the city’s planning and architecture instead reinforce loneliness and isolation. We can see evidence of life happening around us, but feel shut out of the private lives of others. My paintings explore the shared melancholy produced by life in this kind of city, in which small moments of looking drive home our apartness from one another.