I was eight years old when I drew my first president. Within a year, I had drawn them all and could recite them backwards. While many have asked me why I have been so interested in the presidents, all I can say is that it was always just a natural tendency; it struck me odd in turn that so many people could simply take them or leave them. These were the presidents after all, the most important set of people in our nation's history. Together, they seemed to hold a unique promise: the ability to tell the whole narrative of American History as they created it from the inside.

But soon I learned that this was an empty promise - an old-fashioned ideal that represented the exception (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and a few others) far more often than the rule (basically everybody else). One must look at social history from the bottom up, my teachers told me, as opposed to presidential history from the top down, to cull our nation's history. Yet all of this information only intensified my passion. When I painted a 42-panel complete set of the presidents in college, one of my peers described my work as romantic, which struck me as the perfect term to use. It captures my role as a historical painter choosing to paint the presidents, a dying breed painting a dying philosophy.

I do so through portraiture in oil on wood, often working in series. Employing a fuzzy, drybrush technique to a monochromatic pallet of browns and golds, the finished pieces often look like faded photographs that glow from the inside. Yet I am most interested in applying this old-fashioned look to the modern presidents (roughly Franklin D. Roosevelt onward), for they are the ones who are still shifting and settling in our public memory. Traditionally, it has been the artist's role to help separate the great men from the average men - the presidential exceptions from the rule - and I see my position as no different. The resulting images are filtered through the layers of time, opinion, and iconography, as well as the layers of paint from my own brush.