From my earliest engagement with painting, I wanted to explore what it meant to paint on my own terms. I questioned the very structure of painting itself – having found the rectangular, straight-edged shape of a painting and its conventional presentation to be limiting with little space to grow. This perspective opened areas of experimentation and investigation of where painting could go if it were not bound by traditional expectations. My work investigates how canvas holds and contains paint, how paint shapes the canvas, and how paint itself creates illusion, but not a pictorial illusion.

When I think creatively—whether through painting, music, writing, or teaching—I take elements of an existing language and repurpose them to see if new ideas can emerge with the hope that the results will reflect an honest pursuit of something pure and perhaps beautiful. This strategy of upending tradition to take creative risks is counterbalanced with a deep respect for the history of painting, its rich vocabularies and prior triumphs and failures. To spark new directions, I often employ reverse brainstorming --- applying the opposite of conventional approaches to better disrupt traditional frameworks in an effort to deconstruct established conventions and push out boundaries and uncover unexpected possibilities.

By consistently going against the grain, I hope to create space to reimagine how materials interact, transform, and hold meaning. Painting, to me, is not about image-making but about the relationship between paint, canvas, and structure—an evolving exploration of space, time, and materiality.