ARTIST STATEMENT

I paint because when I'm standing in front of a canvas, something honest happens that doesn't happen anywhere else in my life. I begin the process of making a painting by focusing on form and space: where something sits against the edges of the canvas, how deep or shallow the image feels, how one shape presses against another. I find my way through it by improvising, the same way I'd find my way through a capoeira roda, or a dance, or any encounter with another body — not executing a plan, but responding to what's actually in front of me, moment by moment. Working this way, the message of the painting develops on its own. I don't start out knowing what a painting is going to say. I find out — sometimes partway through, sometimes only once it's finished and I'm standing back, looking at what I made.

That said, I want the work to add up to something. I'm not building toward a beginning, middle, and end per se, but I want what results to cohere — to feel, once it's finished, like it's saying something.

Here's the standard I hold the work to: think about encountering a hammerhead shark in the wild, open ocean. The shark doesn't mean anything the way a symbol means something. You couldn't explain what it means if you tried. And it's still one of the most meaningful things that can happen to you. That's the register I want a painting to work in — not a message you decode, but an encounter you have. As Francis Bacon said, "I want the painting to work on your nervous system first." The decoding can come after — but only after the body has already been met.

I grew up in the Shambhala Buddhist community in Boulder, Colorado, which trained me early to look at things before my mind could file them under a name. The artist Robert Irwin put it well: "seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." That training shaped how I see everything — not as scenery, not as material to be used, but as something alive and owed my full attention. That's what I want the painting to do too: not comment on the world, not explain it, just stay present with it long enough that something true comes through.

If a painting is doing its job, I want you to leave it feeling something like this: that who you are is a little mysterious, fundamentally good, and doesn't need to be fixed or figured out in order to be worth knowing. You already are that. The painting isn't telling you something new, it's reminding you who you already are.