My creative side has always been inspired by the built environment around me and the various states of its decay.  The city of New Orleans is steeped in history in a way that continually inspires me, but my work is not just about history.  In New Orleans, especially since Katrina, I get a sense of history not just as a particular phase of the past (the way one would from a museum) but as a process, a transformation, one that is going on every second of every day all around me.  What I try to capture in my artwork is some of the sense of a city in the process of becoming a ruin, of present fading into history.

My paintings are usually concerned with the first stages of this process, and often feature buildings from the neighborhoods, including a series that imagines New Orleans as a modern-day Venice, complete with gondolas.  My work with found objects approaches the past more directly.  Most of these mixed-media pieces are composed, quite literally, of lost fragments of the past, from weathered cypress siding rescued from a crumbling house to bits of slate and tarnished metal that litter the ground.

One of my most important inspirations is my work with a local salvage expert, during which I helped excavate centuries-old privies in the heart of the city.  From this collaboration I acquire the physical materials I continue to use in my artwork (like fragments of china, skeleton keys, glass bottles and porcelain dolls parts) as well as the emotional material that drives me.  Wrenching the past up from the ground and reassembling it into something that expresses the melancholy and decaying grandeur of this city is what I strive for...