I spent the first half of my life in Utah constructing robots and lighthouses from a box of junk I received one early childhood Christmas. At age seven I was sent to school in Mexico, where I was taught manners by an aunt whose Belgian and Spanish parents had confirmed her misfit in Mexican society. Living aboard a sailboat the following year, I traveled the Atlantic coast of the United States in the company of family, Madonna’s Immaculate Collection, and Dvorak’s New World Symphony.

Having been raised the product of a Mexican mother and an Irishman in a home defined by familiar sounds, tastes, and smells rather than location, my non-traditional upbringing has long made me question those influences, innate and environmental, that compose the individual. Unable to isolate a single self-defining event or circumstance, I have come to view people each as a sum of all events that have shaped his character.

One’s fortune may be consequent of an innate nature, the decisions he makes, or determined by his social environment. Whether one chooses to conceal his past or put in on display, he wears his experiences, recorded in each wrinkle, every scar. In my paintings I explore the individual experiences that have shaped my subjects. Just as people wear their experiences on the surface, buildings display their histories by way of chipping paint, cracks, and stains. To me the greater the accumulation of experiences, the greater the subject’s character and the more human it becomes. On occasion, I have encountered buildings that draw more breath, that have a more audible pulse, than individual people I have met. It is upon focusing on my subject’s idiosyncrasies and imperfections, as in the people I know, that it comes to life.