Artist Statement (2026)

I am interested in experiences that resist being separated into something purely beautiful or grotesque: sex and death, love and resentment, pleasure and pain, the heavenly and the hellish. I often use the body within landscapes, allowing flesh, terrain, and atmosphere to overlap until one begins to become the other, exploring existential questions about death, divinity, and decay.  There is a gentle brutality to the way I consider these subjects, forms caught in transformation, moments where something is neither fully one thing nor another, but suspended between states.

I deliberately start paintings without a plan, sometimes working from a small sketch made intuitively, late at night in a hypnagogic state. But these sketches are only suggestions for what might happen on the canvas. If I become completely in command of the image I would lose nuances and moments only the subconscious could provide. Forms shift, disappear, overlap, and return in altered states. I try to shape them just enough for the mind to reach toward a resolution, while leaving enough ambiguity to create unease.

I work primarily in oil, drawn to the viscosity of oil paint and its physical relationship to bodily fluids, particularly blood, and to substances that thin, clot, pool, or move across a surface. I work on a large scale so that it requires my body to be an extension of the mark making and so that the work has an evocative and immersive impact on the viewer's body. I build the paintings through layers, often working on several at once and returning to them over time.I use mediums that allow the paint to drip, spread, coagulate, or dissolve, allowing the material itself to participate in the transformation of the image. Each layer becomes part of what came before it, much like experience itself: accumulated, obscured, altered, and resurfacing. 

Francis Bacon, Cecily Brown, and Eleanor Johnson are important in my development as a painter, particularly in their approaches to flesh, transformation, and psychological tension. I also return to old Symbolist painters such as Arnold Böcklin and William Degouve de Nuncques for their use of atmosphere and ambiguity in their work to both obscure and articulate change in form.

Ultimately, I return to questions I do not expect answers to: where do we go at the end, what else exists beyond what we can perceive, how does entropy affect the body, and what feelings bring us closest to something divine? I want the paintings to remain within uncertainty—continually evolving, and caught somewhere between formation and coming undone.