Billy Pilgrim is a character of time travel from Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
We are all Billy Pilgrim.
We are made of our past, present, and imagined future selves. Every interaction carries that accumulation. Each moment is layered with what has already happened and what is still unfolding.
“So it goes.”
“Ah ho.”
“This too shall pass.”
These phrases are not only about loss. They point to the constant movement of experience. You are not the same person from one moment to the next. You carry things forward, but they shift. Nothing is fixed.
I am drawn to Vonnegut for his plain speech paired with metaphysical weight. I once saw him speak at Indiana University. Years later, I encountered someone who looked exactly like him working at a liquor store. When I asked if he had ever been told this, he replied, “Who says I’m not?”
I like the idea of Vonnegut working there, observing ordinary exchanges. Time travel does not have to be dramatic. It can exist in small, repeated interactions.
In my paintings, figures emerge and dissolve within simplified spaces. Loud color and gestures move between sincerity and disruption. Elements of kitsch and cartoon language appear alongside references to painting history.
Stories are told and retold until they shift. Images become abstractions of themselves.
By unfolding the familiar until it becomes strange, I look for a way into spaces that cannot be accessed directly. These spaces are glimpsed rather than possessed. They appear through indirect observation, through gesture, and through attention.
Painting becomes a way to move through time.
An accumulation of moments.
A record of perception in motion.