I am sick of polka dots.

It's been a yearlong obsession. I see them everywhere. I do things for them, because of them. It's madness!

This is the painting that started it all, a harmless little thing really - something to come down from the lions with. I more or less just made this for myself, and through the act of painting I had time to meditate on the way this pattern transfers a kind of infectious happiness on everything around it. That theory carried forward into some of the visual research begun in early 2009, and when faced with the brutal violence that my subject matter sometimes churns up, I found this 'screen of happiness' at the ready and began to use it. 

The polka dots are a device and an obsession. At their best, they can be a means to transform meaning, and at their worst they become something to rely on when I'm stuck.