My work deals with the abstraction of gesture, color, layers, and shadows to push and pull the space within my canvas to create an artistic narrative. In my pieces, I seek to understand the human relationships and interactions we encounter and experience every day, and how those connections shape us. Sometimes dreamy, sometimes more serious, I utilize inspirations from beloved novels, memories, the intensity of communication, and the narratives around us to guide my work. Although I predominantly work in oil painting and encaustic painting, I will utilize mediums in mixed media, photography, and sculpture, depending on the necessary narrative. In my work, I ingrain influences by Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, Joan Snyder, and Gregory Crewdson as crucial components, inspired by their curated use of color, shadows in the space, and techniques of storytelling through their forms, shadows, and highlights.
My goal in creating these works is to become an artistic narrator, creating an emotional response in the ways the colors and gestures float across the canvas, in a carefully curated way, much the same way an author writes text. I use the inspired feeling of reading a particular text to create a story within the canvas, pulling from personal experiences, and thus these pieces turn into my own coming-of-age stories. As these stories take shape, the interactions of viewers’ observations become the last layer of relationships expressed in my work – and in a sense, the final chapter. But, as the methods in which we communicate today have disconnected our relationships, it continues to create a barrier to fostering relationships. With these methods of communication at odds with each other, finding timeless connections has become even more crucial – my work provides a visual form to a world constantly at odds with communication between loved and unloved ones. It is within these series I take on a new interpretation of a portrait of a person, a lifetime of communication, miscommunication, yearning, and anguish encompassed in one piece.