Artist Statement

My paintings emerge from a deep fascination with the sea and outer space—vast, unknowable terrains shaped by invisible forces. These terrains become metaphors for emotional states that are equally expansive and difficult to chart.

The works are layered, saturated fields that evoke weather maps, seafloor scans, and topographical diagrams. These forms of mapping—tools we use to measure and interpret the natural world—offer a language to trace the less visible emotional and psychological forces that shape human experience. I’m interested in mapping not just what we see but what we feel: interior landscapes made visible through color, gesture, and accumulation.

I build these surfaces through methods that mimic geologic time and atmospheric change, including pouring, smearing, sanding, and excavation. As I remove and reveal layers, the work holds tension between memory and immediacy, control and chance. The resulting spaces feel suspended, like floating in a pressurized capsule or drifting at the edge of a gravitational frontier. I’m drawn to the idea of being pulled toward the unknown—a visual metaphor for the emotional gravity we each navigate.

The paintings function as intricate matrix-like environments, abstract but suggestive of systems and networks. I often think of them as echoing neural pathways or oceanic currents, where everything is connected in a state of constant movement and transformation. This idea of flux and interdependence is central to my practice.

Lately, I’ve been especially inspired by the scientific discovery of water vapor clouds in deep space—evidence of water suspended beyond our world. These distant, ethereal phenomena mirror the way emotion hovers just outside articulation. That sense of something elemental, hovering and ungraspable, drives both the process and the imagery in my work.

Through painting, I conjure a boundless realm—an ocean adrift in the cosmos—where celestial bodies drift like islands amid an infinite dark. Waves of shimmering starlight move across layered surfaces, revealing luminous traces beneath. These paintings are vivid metaphors for memory, emotion, and our deep interconnection with the natural world.