Artist Statement

My work explores my place in the world and relation to it. It comes from my own observations and experiences through physical sensation, sound, and visual stimuli. I’m interested in fractal self-replication and the patterns that make up the smallest and largest aspects of our world and are echoed over and over in between.

The recurring spiral motif- though often obscured through layers of abstraction- symbolizes life, death, and rebirth. This applies to not only our life cycles and those of our surroundings but also to the processes and patterns occurring and repeating beyond our base-level perception.

There’s something to the idea of returning to one place over and over again. It's always growing and yet continues to replicate the same shapes in a pattern. This shape shows up repeatedly from the micro to the macro, and as a symbol from prehistoric art to contemporary. It’s found in shells, flowers, our DNA, fingerprints, and the shape of a galaxy and so much in between, connecting us all to the world and its life.

I follow a pretty classic abstraction process. I start with a more detailed drawing or painting and each proceeding sketch becomes more abstract: zooming in and cropping, losing some details and emphasizing some somewhere else. It becomes an abstracted embodiment of what originally drew me to the subject.

The delicate and subtle shifts of color I am able to achieve in working with fluid, thin washes of paint emphasize the organic qualities of my subjects. I can embrace the unpredictability of water, that gives the paintings an essence of spontaneity and dynamism, but really I’m still controlling shape, space, color, and transparency very closely.