Themes, motives

Interested in nurturing beauty, I create paintings that reference life processes through layers of struggle, discovery, recovery and generation. Employing a metaphor of the garden, my paintings can be seen as spaces where I determine what grows, stays, is mulched, or weeded out. I seek a balance between coexisting desires of restraint and control and extravagance with a sense of coming unbound. I emphasize the painting field as a whole, while also paying deep attention to the minute, inviting the viewer to discover complex worlds at different scales within each environment I create. My intimate, domesticated painted environments offer the viewer the possibility to experience the spaces I find beautiful and to add to the conversation of where beauty resides today in contemporary art.

Here, the natural world is consumed - a physical reality and an internal one. It is walled, but roofless - a contained space. Elements are absorbed, same energies interacting within us that work around us - the natural forces of gravitation and electromagnetism, fire and water, growth, and time. Fundamental interactions in nature, forces that hold the universe together are treated as symbolic of the human experience. The sense of rooflessness is an essential theme to my thesis. There is a constant return to the sky. The shifting clouds, the stages of the sun and the moon mimic a traveling through time, a constant change. There is a given feeling of freedom and confinement. There is a vulnerability, a destitution, and a lack of shelter. The open sky, always out of reach, is a tease to be free. Though it also hints at a feeling of oneness, a symbolic relation between the divine and the human. The open, uninterrupted path for direct prayer. Roofless indicates a continuous linkage between the ground and the sky, between rain and dirt, between nature and humankind. .