In the majority of this current body of work I have used my hometown, Racine, Wisconsin, as a backdrop for larger, universal narratives. Racine remains the permanent landscape of my psyche and my perception of the visual world is perpetually gauged against this early landscape. It is ironic and yet fitting that the French word for "root" is Racine. While this is a very specific environment, it is nevertheless inherently America and this work could not have been produced elsewhere.

This choice of hometown as my primary landscape and the inevitable exploitation of early memory is not nostalgic – if anything it is anti-nostalgia. Nor am I following fashion by wallowing in the current fleeting obsession with victim status and exorcism of one's past so thoroughly politically correct in the art world this month. Instead it is a careful and conscious reprocessing of the barrage of both collective and personal influences that a child of the first TV generation could not escape.

As I explore the language of Racine's landscape, my focus has narrowed to that which can be seen from the homes of my brother and my parents. My brother's children populate certain paintings, both enacting specific roles and serving as metaphor.

Time and distance have allowed, I feel, an objective gaze upon my experience of coming of age in America, while memory and more recent sojourns make producing work that is extremely personal virtually unavoidable.

My work is currently moving in a direction away from specific landscapes to invented tableaux. While still based upon Racine's topography, architecture and cultural sensibilities, the family figurants are slowly being replaced by individuals from my present.