About

Artist Statement

I paint because I can’t help it — art is as essential to me as breathing.

My eye is constantly drawn to the isolated moment, that fleeting gleam of light across a landscape or a jacket hanging in an entryway. I keep a camera close at hand to capture these sudden flashes of inspiration, so I can later translate that intense inspiration and accompanying emotion onto canvas, paper, or wood panel. My work spans oils, acrylics, watercolors, and pastels, and I often combine techniques and surfaces to push my exploration of color and mood. From careful glazing over an underpainting — reminiscent of old master traditions — to thick impasto applied with a palette knife, every method I use has a purpose: it either deepens my fascination with delicate detail or challenges me to break free from perfectionism.

My journey has been guided by an innate sense of proportion, aesthetics, and a relentless desire to bring what I see — and imagine — into the world. I studied painting at UCLA, then continued privately to learn everything from classical oil glazing to airbrushed underpaintings in acrylic that allow light to bounce through with luminous intensity. Watercolor is my newest challenge, offering me a chance to blend spontaneity with measured control. Still lifes and landscapes — both real and dreamed — form the heart of my work, but I don’t aim to recreate them in a purely photographic sense. Instead, my focus is on distilling the essence of a moment, the emotional spark that draws me in. Through each brushstroke, layer of glaze, or sweep of the palette knife, I endeavor to make that vision tangible and share the wonder I feel when light, color, and form collide.

I begin every painting with a sense of awe, a place of focusing completely on a scene or a still-life or a shape that, to me, creates that visceral pull in my soul. The painting develops from that, capturing not the literal sight, but the sense of what made it catch my eye and break into my attention and focus. I paint what I want to see on my own walls, in my own space, and I want the painting to bring something new into view each time it is seen, rather than have the painting drift over time into the background. I love color and I find the moment when a painting comes together and often goes beyond what I hoped for it, breathtaking.

I paint toward feeling. It can be nostalgia, beauty, sadness, joy - it has to be something. It is always in my paintings.

Bio

I was born in Berkeley, California.

I was immediately whisked off to New Haven, CT and then Eugene, OR. By the time I was truly aware of a location, I found myself in Urbana, IL. At seven, I moved back to California, to Del Mar, a sleepy oceanside beach town north of San Diego. It had not exploded in population as yet when I got there and, for a kid, it was idyllic. I would get up at 5 AM and go sit on the sandstone cliffs over the beach below our house, watching the fog retreat from the sun. I sat in locked-up lifeguard towers in the moonlight, listening to the waves gently move the sand.

I painted as a kid because I was good at form and shadow and proportion and balance, and obsessive enough to make that come together even with unfamiliar and new material and technique.

I learned film photography and darkroom in junior high, and I found it the first art that didn’t come easily to me. I kept at it, though almost entirely digital now.

I painted as a teenager because I couldn’t afford posters, to have images on my walls. I painted in watercolor, using almost no real technique, just finding my way to imagery that worked. Color was already a huge part of it. The golden light in California had already changed how I saw.

After high school and UCLA art school, I’ve kept learning and practicing. School teaches you to start learning, but from that all artists are self-taught by necessity. Each painting is an adding to depth of the toolbox you have as an artist.

I am currently a Californian living in New England, which I’ve grown to love for the deep snows (sometimes) in winter, the bright red and orange fall leaf colors, and for fireflies. I love fireflies…

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