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ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice as a painter is rooted in exploring connections—to nature, to others, to time, and critically, to the disruption of those connections. Working in a vibrant, expressionistic style informed by my background in theater, I create figurative narratives and landscapes charged with drama and deliberate mystery. Each painting invites viewers into an unsettled space where they must question what's happening: What are these figures thinking? What is their relationship to each other, to the environment they inhabit?
I draw from landscapes that have shaped me—the mangroves and banyans of Florida, the woods of Maryland—places where I've witnessed nature behaving in unexpectedly anthropomorphic ways. These moments of recognition, where a tree limb gestures like an arm or a root system suggests a nervous system, reveal the deeper kinship between human and natural worlds. Through bold color and gestural mark-making, I bring these observations into painted form, transforming personal experience into larger meditations on belonging and alienation.

My technical approach derives from the tradition of Cézanne and the colorful planes of Fairfield Porter, but I layer in linear work that emphasizes gesture and movement—the animating force within both figures and landscapes. I'm particularly interested in what I call the "auric nature of edges," that glow around objects that enhances their presence and power while balancing visual weight across the composition. This technique creates a sense of heightened reality, a disconcerting atmosphere where ordinary moments become charged with psychological tension.

The theatrical quality in my work isn't merely aesthetic—it's structural. Like a stage tableau frozen mid-scene, my paintings capture characters in moments of ambiguous action, their internal states suggested but never fully revealed. I'm drawn to the intimate psychological spaces explored by Alice Neel and Lois Dodd, while channeling the dramatic intensity of Eric Fischl and the surreal mythology of Leonora Carrington. The viewer becomes audience to these enigmatic scenes, encouraged to construct their own narratives from the visual clues I provide.

Gesture and movement pulse through everything I make. Whether depicting figures or landscapes, I'm concerned with the kinetic energy of being alive—how bodies lean, reach, withdraw; how trees bend and roots grasp. Through painterly gesture and chromatic intensity, I seek to capture not just what I've seen or felt, but the electric, sometimes unsettling charge of our connections and disconnections.
Ultimately, my paintings are acts of witness and inquiry. They don't offer answers but instead create space for questions: What binds us to place, to each other, to ourselves? What happens when those bonds fray? Through color, line, and deliberate ambiguity, I invite viewers to sit with these mysteries, recognizing their own stories within the layered narratives I construct.