I am interested in people. My oil paintings and digital illustrations depict the figure in social contexts, and concern what its presentation reveals about the subject and its audience. How much information about a person’s essence is gleaned from a fleeting public or private pose? What does the way we process this limited information reveal about our own identity? In my most recent series entitled Signal/Noise and Public Spaces, I explore this theme through studies of fragmented body parts. The portraits deliberately simplify the subject, omitting the wealth of information supplied by the face, while flattening and stylizing what is presented. The result is an abstraction that seeks to convey the essence of a subject. Can the essence—or signal—emerge from the information provided? How much of the absent information is simply noise? I continue to explore the interplay of identity and self-presentation in more recent works which focus on other aspects of the figure and explore distinct ways of simplifying the painted image.