THE AUCTION COLLECTION
At the end of 2023, I began a series based on my sixteen-year career as an auctioneer, though I eventually abandoned the collection for various reasons. Still, the work kept calling to me. Every so often, I would take the paintings out and reflect on them. I realized there was more to uncover.
I returned to the project, this time drawing from my childhood. Becoming an auctioneer wasn’t accidental—I grew up in the business, which has shaped me in ways I haven’t fully explored. This new collection delves deeply into auctions, consumerism, collecting, hoarding, and death.
THE BIDDERS
These eight pieces began as portraits of people who had attended my auctions regularly. I saw their faces several times a month for nearly two decades. They were a part of the fabric of my professional life, yet I knew little about them beyond what they bought and how much they were willing to pay.
Painting them from memory allowed me to delve deeper into their personalities, but the finished work offered little to others beyond a depiction of a stranger. I needed to incorporate them into something that would accurately represent their relationship to me. So, I turned them into bidder paddles. They are now what they were in my life-vessels of commerce.
THE GALLERY
These four paintings capture the atmosphere of the sales floor. From my perspective as the auctioneer, the crowd often became a blur of faces and limbs, vacillating between frenzied activity and complete stillness. It was literally a room full of nameless individuals, known only by their bidder numbers. Who they were outside the walls of the auction gallery was irrelevant to me; they were simply a source from which to extract money.