STATEMENT OF WORK

My work begins where memory ends. I paint to remember what is already gone and what is constantly fleeting, to hold onto a world that’s no longer intact. I’m not interested in accuracy. And I try not to consider an audience. I want to trust my subconscious.

I move between abstraction and figuration, intuition and control. I carve into the surface, draw over it, stain it, strip it. I want the painting to speak before I understand it. This process repeats until it allows me to move forward in the work, discovering figures within the layers and transparencies. 

Through a layering process, some moments are vivid, others recede. Some figures dissolve into the background. Others insist on themselves. 

I paint birds, angels, and other winged beings—because those figures can fly away at any moment. I am always trying to leave. Or return. Or both. Through my work, I am attempting to remedy all that is lost in the past, I am chasing an emotion that I will never experience again. This is my constant desire: to retrieve what is forever gone.

My childhood home was lost in the Palisades Fire. My grandmother’s home was also lost. Two generations of our family’s past gone. 

What hurts the most are the things we lost that I’ll never get to know. The home videos of my sister and I growing up that my mom was saving for our weddings. The baby photos that we never organized into albums. Photos of my great grandparents. Gone forever before I memorized their faces. Every one of my father’s childhood photos. My parents wedding pictures. My grandparents wedding pictures. Every photo of my grandfather Josh. 

It’s petty, but my friend’s houses and their framed childhood photos make me jealous. That my grandmother can’t look at photos of her late husband anymore. She was a painter; all her paintings lost. I hate not having a place to call home in the holidays. Not having a place to call home anywhere. 

My 95 year old grandmother now’s lives in a one bedroom apartment in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

I hate that I’ll never see my baby photos again.

I am more aware than ever that life is ephemeral. My work has become a constant struggle to capture what is forever going away. We can’t hold onto life, it’s moving too fast, we can only catch a glimpse and maybe, through that, see some truth.