MY STORY

My Story

I didn’t set out to become a painter. I went to college for theater.

While earning my BFA, I discovered scenic painting and fell in love with the scale, color, atmosphere, and transformation of it. After college, my path wandered through acting, interior design, home staging, and other creative work, but painting never completely left me.

In 2015, while going through treatment for breast cancer, I found my way back to it in a much more serious way. Painting became a place where I could process things I didn’t necessarily have words for. What began as a return to creativity gradually became the center of my artistic life.

I also grew up moving often, which may be part of why memory has always fascinated me. I have sometimes arrived somewhere new and felt an uncanny sense that I had been there before. That feeling, the overlap between memory, imagination, recognition, and uncertainty, continues to find its way into my work.

Over time, the women in my paintings became less like portraits and more like a language of their own. They carry ideas about identity, resilience, vulnerability, transformation, and the things we reveal or keep hidden.

My work has also become increasingly symbolic. Halos, chains, flowers, serpents, veils, fragments of text, jewelry, and shifting surfaces appear again and again. I don’t always begin with a fixed meaning for every symbol. Sometimes the meaning reveals itself as the painting develops.

My background in theater and scenic art still influences how I work. I think about light, atmosphere, layers, and what changes depending on where the viewer stands. Metallic and interference pigments allow parts of a painting to appear, disappear, or shift as the light moves.

My recent series, Serpents & Saints, brings many of these threads together. It explores the space between strength and vulnerability, beauty and danger, memory and reinvention.

I am not interested in explaining every painting completely. I would rather leave something unresolved, something that asks the viewer to look again.

Memory is my subject. Symbols are my language. Color is my collaborator.