Artist Statement (2026)

My work explores existential questions surrounding death, divinity, decay, and the physical and emotional sensations that exist between them. 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. There is a gentle brutality to the way I consider these subjects. I often use the body within landscapes, allowing flesh, terrain, and atmosphere to overlap until one begins to become the other. I am drawn to forms caught in transformation, moments where something is neither fully one thing nor another, but suspended between states.

I deliberately avoid deciding too much before I begin a painting. I may start with a small sketch made intuitively, sometimes late at night in a hypnagogic state, but these sketches are only suggestions for what might happen on the canvas. Color, composition, and mood provide a starting point while the painting itself determines where it goes. I want to leave enough uncertainty for the work to surprise me. If I become completely in command of the image, something important is lost. 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, sometimes using acrylic in the early stages when necessary. I am 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 use mediums that allow the paint to drip, spread, coagulate, or dissolve, allowing the material itself to participate in the transformation of the image. I build paintings through layers, often working on several at once and returning to them over time. Each layer becomes part of what came before it, much like experience itself: accumulated, obscured, altered, and resurfacing. A painting may begin as one feeling and eventually become something unexpected.

Scale is important to me. I work large because I find that the paintings become more evocative when they approach the scale of the body, or something monumental. I think of them almost as monoliths: physical presences that confront the viewer as much as they are observed. I want the image to feel immersive rather than distant.

Hyman Bloom, Cecily Brown, and Francis Bacon were important in my development as a painter, particularly in their approaches to flesh, transformation, and psychological tension. I also return to Symbolist painters such as Arnold Böcklin and William Degouve de Nuncques for their use of atmosphere and ambiguity. Horror, particularly psychological horror, has similarly influenced the emotional weight of my work. Writing is another important part of my practice, and my paintings often exist in conversation with the fiction I write, sharing an interest in transformation, the unknown, and environments that feel psychologically charged.

Ultimately, I return to questions I do not expect to answer: where do we go when it is over, what else exists beyond what we can perceive, what does our limited time mean, and what feelings bring us closest to something divine? I want the paintings to remain within that uncertainty—partially formed, continually changing, and caught somewhere between becoming and coming apart.

I am completing my BFA in Painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. I currently live and work in Boston, MA.