Nolan

Starting as a teenager, I have kept every pair of jeans I ever owned.  Long past when they were wearable.  Lugging them with me as I moved through life and the country.  I always felt they were useful for something.
 

In 2023, I found a purpose for all those jeans I had kept for decades.  I started to see the jeans as a canvas to be transformed into paintings.  I bleach and cut the jeans to prepare them.  I build frames to fit the cut jeans.  I then assemble the jeans onto these frames create the place where the paintings can reveal themselves.  

​

In the process of bleaching the jeans, sometimes jeans disintegrate.  I use the jean disintegrations in some of my paintings.  This reminds me of a story I reheard at my grandpa's funeral (who passed away in 2024): When he was a teenager his high school burned down and he had to start his senior year at a new high school.  He and his friends from his original high school decided, in an act of camaraderie, to have white jeans and all wear them to school.  They each bleached them—but as I have done on many occasions now—left them in the bleach too long.  My grandpa's freshly white jeans only lasted a week before they disintegrated.  I know I heard this story when I was a child, and it unconsciously resonated with how I construct a place for these paintings to reveal themselves.

​

Jeans are something we wear everyday.  There is beauty—art—in this everyday.