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Statement

I opened a studio-gallery in late 2019 as a place for art to live within the community. The public program was interrupted by the shutdown, but the pause only intensified my practice: an emptied calendar, a studio full of paint, and a renewed insistence on making. From the first canvases that followed, my direction was immediate and uncompromising — abstraction as a means to hold time, sensation, and memory without literalism.

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Practice and Intent

My work treats the canvas as an atmosphere rather than an argument. I favor forms that allow space to breathe, surfaces that invite exploration and shifting perspective. Abstraction, for me, is a method of attention: it resists fixed meaning and welcomes a passing gaze or longer contemplative thoughts. 

Design and creativity are the heartbeat of my life. I do not make resolutions on canvas; I record lived experience — memory, beauty, loss, resilience, and a persistent, quiet optimism. Each painting is a discrete moment, layered with what has been and what is still arriving.

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Origins and Influence

I learned early to read between gestures and silence. Loss threaded through my life from a young age, not to harden but to deepen sensitivity and sharpen attention. Art and athletics offered refuge: arenas where emotion could exist without explanation and complexity could be held. That instinct to notice, to retain, to layer — to let thought and feeling mix into image — remains central to my process.

Raised in the rural Midwest and living now in Southern California, my perspective is shaped by open skies, slow rhythms, and coastal light. Nature does not appear in my work as depiction but as energy: movement, growth, retreat, renewal. These forces inform my palette, my mark-making, and the structural tensions I pursue.

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Tension and Grounding

My paintings live in a tension I value: gravity without heaviness, vulnerability without fragility. I remain instinctively optimistic — youthful in outlook, open, earnest — and that temperament is present in the work. Family, friends, and animals are my constants; they are the quiet anchors that remind me of loyalty, instinct, and presence.

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What I Aim To Do

I make work that surprises and welcomes, that embraces and unsettles in equal measure. On the canvas I arrange elements — color, motion, relation — as a way of composing life’s compound moments. My aim is to expand the viewer’s capacity to feel and to think, to push boundaries while offering a space for reflection.