My paintings are anchored in deeply embedded memory, triggered by the overlooked and the less obviously beautiful. Years of close looking, seeing, and feeling have changed how I navigate my surroundings. Experiences fade away but continue to exist within; they reemerge as I let go of control of the brush.
There is a constant fear of forgetting, as knowledge accumulates and pushes memories deeper into who I am becoming. Mundane events, intensified and transformed through memory, help me understand my past and, most importantly, how I am evolving.
My studio provides a place where sensations and emotional experiences can exist without first being translated into words. I open these channels and allow them to take shape on my canvases, simplified and distilled. I translate memories and observations into paintings by progressively removing information until I arrive at what feels like the essence of what I remember. Shapes are simplified, colors adjusted, and relationships tested until the image no longer describes its source directly but still carries something of its structure and duration.
Abstraction allows me to protect the memory, keeping the world at a distance while bringing it closer in the studio. I obscure the narrative deliberately. I use abstraction to confront attention: to slow looking, make small shifts more perceptible, and hold the viewer at the point where recognition begins to become uncertain.
Because the obscured narrative is important to me, the desire to prescribe what the viewer should read or see feels insignificant. Rather than fully describing an event, I want the paintings to make absence, interval, and residue visible, just as memory itself is continually being redefined and reimagined. The process helps me understand that the essence is held close within. At the same time, I want to spark curiosity and inquiry, allowing the viewer to create their own experience, feelings, and associations.
This contradiction, the desire to move and touch without giving the viewer the narrative, is perhaps an impossible one. The permanence of the painted object against the disappearance of its source is central to the work. Material decisions do not simply illustrate an idea fixed in advance; they help determine the image as it develops. The reduced forms ask for return and sustained attention, allowing what first appears empty or familiar to become active through looking.
My paintings exist in a constant dialogue between complex and completely quotidian experience rather than being separated from it. That tension is essential, moving my inquiry from one canvas to the next.
​
​
​