My everyday experiences, dispositions, and memories compose the scope of my work. My work portrays living subjects and everyday objects that I use to create compositional balance, the supporting structure for forms in space, and depictions of mundane moments. I use the repetition of forms to depict motion, the passage of time, and the emphasis on the unchanging reality of the everyday. 

My work is inspired by an interest in learning how to convey the humanity of the figure, in sculptural and drawn form. My parallel interest in ancient history and classical art, which includes a long history of representational figurative work, reinforces and informs my enthusiasm for making figurative work. I enjoy thinking about how tastes and styles change over centuries and how my art can speak to and fit within the long history of figurative sculpture. 

Throughout my career as an artist, I have strived to create novel characters, settings, and scenes from my imagination, which requires a solid understanding of observed reality.  As a result, most of my work revolves around the drive to visually understand the world around me to the point where I may invent my own scenes and figures. 

I strive to create order out of chaos in my work by combining the organic forms of my subjects with compositional or geometric structures. I am inspired by the geometric simplicity and joyful nature of Charley Harper’s work, as well as by the treatment of light and edge in the works of both Anders Zorn and John Singer Sargent. My work is sometimes from direct observation and sometimes from invention. 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words… I like to think of my works from life as my answer to a friend asking “What have you been up to?,”; illustrating every detail I can to show them what they may have missed while we were apart. This diaristic approach provides a trail for me to follow when I myself can no longer recall what I had seen, heard, or felt- providing a record of where I was then and where I am now.

As an artist, I embark on a journey of discovery with every piece I create. For me, the process of creating art is an exploration, marked by searching for the hidden truths within. Through constant revision and openness to change, my artwork emerges from a foggy backlog of previous versions, allowing me to find the most truthful depiction of a subject. 

My artwork reflects a unique perception of the world around me as I attempt to grasp it through photography, painting, and drawing.  Photography allows me to express myself impulsively due to the immediacy, volume, and potential for manipulation. I primarily work in black and white film in various formats, and am attracted to the prolonged process needed to create a print. I use photography as a form of memory, capturing a string of moments in time that simultaneously record the past and present as they await the future. 

I seek a balance between utility and decoration through my work, creating pieces that are both visually interesting and comfortable to use. By drawing from nature and the human form, I search for a sense of fluidity and immediacy in my work, hoping to maintain the fluid curves found in natural elements. My work is nontraditional in form, forcing the user to consider how they might engage with each piece.

I focus on the act of creating movement in various mediums and methods, all of which feel equally important to my experience as an artist. I am informed by a background in two-dimensional art which made me critically engaged with the ebbs and flows of image composition. I have taken elements from what I value in two-dimensional mediums and translated them to my three-dimensional works in ceramics and oil clay, searching for strong silhouettes, intriguing negative spaces, and dynamic gestural lines throughout my works. 

The main media I work with are pen, pencil, oil paint, and clay. With all these media, my artworks are tied tightly to what I experience in my everyday life, whether it is something I see, or something that I create to be used daily...

Through pen and pencil sketches, I constantly search for natural compositions in my everyday surroundings...My oil paintings are usually “born” from my sketches...

I take a different approach to my ceramic works since these pieces are mostly functional but also something else sometimes.

In approaching my work, I always feel that the medium is subservient to the story. We all deserve to explore the endless possibilities of the imagined, and there should be no boundaries in place to prevent this. My artwork serves as a refuge between reality and what we can only dream of, a place of imaginative play where all are welcomed. 

Tone, shadow, and shape are the main focus of my practice explored through the figure, still life, and landscape.  I’ve worked with several mediums including graphite, acrylic paint, oil paint, and watercolor, but I am most drawn to charcoal. However, I’ve recently grown attached to relief printmaking and the way it forces the artist to make extreme decisions in terms of light and dark. 

My work is a mix of observational study and narrative derived from my identity, community, experiences, and physical appearance. My experiences guide how I interact with the world, while my physical characteristics often impact how I am treated. Thus, my work is guided by my meditations on these assumptions and my interpretation of self in a society that frequently tries to categorize, simplify, and control. 

Through a sliver in that aged curtain

wind blows from winter to spring

silently, wrinkles all rubbed in

leaves scattered around

stained black by the soil

skeins of shadow, knitted as one

gently lift up the new buds

swaying in rhythm, they dance and giggle