Artist Statement -
I grew up in a garden. Not at the edges of it, looking in, but at ground level, in the bushes, in the company of small creatures going about their lives. It was a world that felt safe and endlessly interesting, and it taught me something I have never stopped practicing: that the closer you look, the more extraordinary everything becomes.
That sense of wonder never left. A hummingbird fifteen inches from my face, hovering, studying me with the same curiosity I bring to it. Honeybees filling the air around a redbud tree in full bloom, moving through the blossoms with a gentleness that stops time. A buck rising from behind a bush six feet away, close enough that we lock eyes, close enough that I stop breathing. These encounters do not last. They are over almost before they begin. Amazing. Fleeting. They are exactly what I am trying to hold.
For the past year, migraines have kept me close to home, away from heat and bright light. What began as a limitation became an invitation. My attention turned inward, to the balcony, to the birds and small animals that visit it, to the intimate and overlooked world just outside my window. The same child who spent hours at ground level in the garden found herself there again. I became a student of what I saw. I read about the physics of hummingbird iridescence, the aerodynamics of bird flight, the way my Bengal cat's fur catches and scatters light. The closer I looked, the more there was to find.
I work in oil on linen and gesso panels, drawn always to the small and the specific. I want my paintings to do what that redbud tree did to me: stop you, hold you, and make the ordinary feel, for a moment, completely extraordinary.
