I am interested in the way modes of depiction bear the idiosyncratic marks of historic circumstance and individual sensibility while performing their picture labors. My enthusiasms range from Roman and early Christian mosaics to Renaissance painting and Italian art of the 1920s and 1930s. My paintings and sculpture usually respond to what I call the rhetorical solicitations of a source, whereby my work acts out a skewed response to what I imagine the work “wants.” I plan to make new artworks developed from observational drawings of selected historic artworks in Rome. I will also be finishing a book I’m doing with Periscope Publishing called Blind Handshake, which is an attempt to flush out, from both sides of the artist/critic relation, a variety of rhetorical strategies while celebrating those idiosyncratic personal and historic traces.