Excerpt 2 from Runaway Horse

I spent a good part of the 1990s in my apartment watching as many film noir movies as I could get my hands on. Luckily there was an exceptional video rental store and an independent movie theater that played an occasional noir classic and both venues fill my incessant appetite for this film genre. This was also the time when I developed my boxed assemblage style. So the artistic development connection is fairly obvious.

In terms of subject matter, I diverge from noir greatly, but there are many stylistic choices that I’ve garnered from these films. The fact that my medium of boxed assemblage is often referred to as shadowbox art simply goes without saying. But, I do use many film staging and framing techniques when I compose a piece. One brief sample of borrowed technique is that when I’m determining the placement of a figure, or face, the direction of their gaze is quintessentially important and sometimes can tie a whole piece together.