artist statement

My life’s interest is the human experience.

Early in my career, I found answers in the rigid lines and clear edges of architectural modernism in my architecture training. I used these lines to instruct my ideas of balance, proportion, and beauty, but quickly I became aware of the dissonance between my soul and the built world. My human nature cannot be explained by modernism. I recognized that the world of human emotion is the most complex architectural environment, and that when balance, proportion and beauty are applied directly to emotion we discover self-acknowledgement, connection to others, and anchoring in the world. Through my work, I explore these three elements of humanity and their links to each other: human emotion, human nature as part of the world, and the human witness.

In my work, ideas of boundary and containment are suspended. By throwing out the barriers between human and environment, as well as artist and observer, each painting is an emotional expanse that takes the viewer inward and then outward into the world again. While probing and exploring my own emotional complexities through shape, color, and space, I aim to uncover a visual language that engages the human experience of another and illuminates a connection that is deeper than words and lines. My paintings challenge the idea that we are disconnected from ourselves, from one another, and the natural world.

My art practice is a single mediation over multiple sessions—equal parts intuitive and predesigned. I begin with quick, instinctive strokes of acrylic paint on canvas to press through barriers of environmental noise and dissonance. As an emotion emerges, it becomes my artistic thesis for the painting. I probe into the commonalities between the inner world of feeling and the outer world of nature, building a moment in which these likenesses merge. With layers of paint, texture and intuition, the emotional expression grows outside the edges of the canvas to include the witness standing in before it. And, for a moment, we stand together in the same space.