Either art is the site of a philosophical investigation which is relevant to human experience, or it is nothing.

~Mel Bochner

Artist Statement

My images begin with my synesthetic experience with music and literature which are the beginnings of my visual compositions.  As paint is applied to canvas, or ink to paper, the images shift, deepen, and broaden as colors, shapes, and movement interact.  These paintings and prints are the record of a journey which in a broad sense become abstract landscapes or mindscapes.

As a queer youth growing up in a very religious, heteronormative, conformist culture I was innately aware from a very early age of the need to find my place in the world, to understand who I was and how I related to the people and world around me.  Although not everyone experiences the need to understand their place in the world as acutely and as early as I did, this is nevertheless something we have all felt at one time or another, and this journey informs my image making.

There are a number of other influences that surface in my work as I build compositions:  artists such as Marden, Frecon, Guston, Miro among others; philosophers such as Bergson and Vattimo; writers such as Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor; and, the work of historians and critics writing about groups such as the Dadaists, artists such as Bellmer, or periods such as postmodernism or our contemporary environment.  These come together in what I hope is a visual amalgam of influences that is both suggestive and open offering the viewer a sense a commonality with the image while also finding room for a visual and intellectual exploration.

A note on titles:  I build my titles by pulling random syllables from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, in a nod to the Dadaists and an attempt to keep them conceptually aligned with my open, yet suggestive abstract imagery.

Brief Bio

My initial plans were to obtain a BFA and MFA, however those plans were cut short at the beginning of the senior year of my BFA program when a local state trooper caught me on date with the man who is currently my husband.  The trooper reported us to the school and we were forced out because we were queer.

After moving to the east coast to build a new life for ourselves, I returned to school at Old Dominion University where I designed, proposed, and completed an interdisciplinary degree in Arts Administration, which I followed with a Masters of Business Administration at the Graduate School of Management, UC Davis.  After working in corporate America for several years to support myself while pursuing my art on weekends and weeknights, I left the workforce in early 2024 and am now focusing exclusively on my art work.