ABOUT

The past doesn't disappear. It becomes part of the world we see. Through painting, I build a world out of what the past leaves behind. I paint the world around me alongside the world I carry within me, where places I encounter in the present coexist with nostalgia, lingering impressions, and imagined possibilities. My paintings emerge from this overlap, a kind of reverie in which the external world and my inner world exist all at once. Here, lived experiences take on new forms, becoming imagined landscapes and fragments of a mythology of my own making.

The Eastern Shores have become an important part of this world, a place I return to both physically and through memory. Away from the fast pace of everyday life, I find myself drawn back to the shifting light across the water, the movement of clouds along the horizon, the afternoon light cast through a window, and all the ways familiar places transform with the passing of a day. The stillness offers space to revisit past experiences and imagine what might lie ahead, opening the mind to hopeful possibilities and unsettling outcomes alike. It is in this space that I find both refuge and unrest, where peace and uncertainty coexist, each made more palpable by the other.

I find this same duality within the landscapes themselves, where crashing waves give way to quiet tide pools and gathering storm clouds coexist with moments of luminous stillness. These contrasts inform the visual language of my paintings through the interplay of calm and storm, light and shadow, night and day, and interior and exterior. Over time, I have come to recognize how these opposing states shape one another, how beauty can emerge from turbulence and tension, and how dread can linger in stillness. Through painting, I explore the connections between these natural contrasts and my own inner world, bringing visual and emotional opposites together within a single image.

These ideas also extend to the physical construction of my paintings. I often work on shaped canvases, using angled edges and irregular outlines to disrupt the traditional picture plane and challenge the boundary between the image and the space around it. Beneath the painted surface, vivid underpaintings introduce another layer of contrast, emerging through gaps and along the edges where the underlying color remains visible. These glimpses are not simply remnants of an earlier stage, but part of the finished image, revealing what lies beneath while altering how the painted forms are perceived. The relationship between what is covered and what remains exposed echoes my interest in the coexistence of opposing states, where what is hidden continues to shape what is seen.

Through painting, I have come to understand that these tensions do not need to be resolved. The act of creating offers another way forward, transforming experiences of beauty and unease into stories, figures, and imagined worlds. More recently, I have begun introducing figures drawn from my own experiences, allowing them to take on lives as characters and archetypes within these imagined landscapes. While the landscape evokes emotional states through atmosphere, light, and form, the figure gives those experiences a human presence. Embodying feelings that might otherwise remain intangible, these figures open the work to stories beyond my own, inviting viewers to recognize aspects of themselves or people they have known within them.

Through creativity, contrast becomes connection. What might seem irreconcilable can occupy the same world, not because its tensions disappear, but because they are given form and allowed to exist together. I am drawn to the space between opposing forces, not to choose one over the other, but to discover what becomes possible when both are held within the same image. Each painting becomes an exploration of what can emerge from that space, where fragments of my own experience become part of a world others can enter and make their own, allowing all points of contrast to inhabit a shared world, all at once.