Artist Statement

Art is engagement. For me, art is how I engage and process the physical world around me, and the events that happen in it. Art-making compels me to look, really look, to feel the physical space I inhabit, and to try to fully empathize with others. It gives me a way to interpret events and turn them into marks on a canvas. My visual language is an expression of not just the world around me, but interactions, time, sound, data, even narrative—the visual residue of my engagement with my world and its stories.

I work in layers of acrylic, graphite, pigment and crayon, building texture and depth. Using my accumulated vocabulary of gestures, I make marks on the painting, and then respond to those marks in an ongoing conversation with the work. I experiment and then pause. Risk and then retreat. It’s a process of engagement and distillation, keeping what belongs and letting go of what doesn’t. Events are veiled, overwritten, or later exposed, leaving traces of their passage. I celebrate the joy of chance, the beauty of expression, and the mystery of concealment and revelation. Slowly, the paintings build their own history and develop a sense of place and narrative. 

Each painting is a personal interaction between myself and the process, a remembered moment of my story, but I hope that the viewer will find resonances with the stories in their own lives.