Two encounters with art have remained with me throughout my life.

As a child, standing beside my father in front of Picasso's Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art; I experienced for the first time, the power of an artwork. The massive canvas felt larger than the room. It filled my eyes with a story, and my young mind only knew that something very bad had happened. The painting's scale enveloped me. The anguish in the figures. The horse screaming. The mother and child. It was all seared into my 8 year old brain.

Years later, I traveled to Rome. I was 27 and bumming through Europe and avoiding a semester at college. I had seen Michelangelo's Pietà in books but this was a different thing. Jesus was melted in his mother’s lap. The flesh represented in stone was visceral. For me, it was pain and loss and resolve, represented a moment of love before Jesus was placed in the tomb. It is moment that all is lost. The movement is over. It is a slice of time in the Christian story and I wanted to run my hands over the marble convinced it would be as warm as flesh.

Where Guernica embodied chaos, the Pietà reveals stillness.

They showed me that images can carry history, grief, memory, and compassion. My own paintings are not direct responses to these works, yet they are informed by the same search for emotional presence.