Over ten years ago I began painting take out coffee cups. The project began as a studio exercise - to paint something that's right in front of me - as a break really, from the job of moving into new studio space. Then 9/11 happened and the explosions of violence worldwide ramped up and continue to accelerate and reverberate today. I thought a good deal about choice, chance, and responsibility and the global connectedness of everything and I continued collecting coffee cups - I have hundreds now - and painting them. These branded take out coffee cups felt then like a symbol of our privileged, isolated bounty. Conversely these very specific portraits also led me to think about the universality of brewing hot drinks and sharing them in a social context, to celebrate, to comfort, to greet, to transition, to sustain. They are about universal contemporary social rituals, and specifically about a culture that sets such high store on individualism: where we choose and are loyal to our preferred roasts, brands, and brews.
It seems that people have personal associations to certain branded cups, like souvenirs. The single portraits when assembled in a grid, resemble ID photos or the poses of graduates in school yearbooks of the 60's and 70's, same placement each, different attitudes. The drawings of groups, overlaid one on another may reference a kind of mapping of past groups or meetings, as well as partial views of signs along the way, which we've been trained by advertising to read, thus finishing the sentence of the logo. And the long group paintings or friezes, like crowd shots, or some unruly House of Representatives engaged in unlikely and shifting alliances, or a stock exchange ticker scrolling out the abbreviated corporate names. All these associations interest me, but they arrive after the simple act of looking and painting which continues to engage me.

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