Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I make luscious, joyful paintings that integrate various painterly languages and approaches to mark, texture, and levels of legibility. This allows for playful slippage between formal and material abstraction, and traditional painterly representation, and allows for disorienting shifts in scale and depth. I think about visually and materially distilling sensate experiences. The works embody transitional spaces between object and image, and meld material and illusionistic space. Cryptic cartoon dog portraits embedded in gradient frames, simplified busty torsos, and bending of light through substances ground the compositions. Color references my experiences looking at photographs, flowers, skies, dogs, hummingbirds, rainbows, postcards, paintings, and more. My moves are inspired by sensual experiences like sniffing, kissing, and crying. I give double meanings to elements, shapes, and symbols through legibility of form. A trompe l’oeil teardrop becomes a dog’s ear or a flower petal. A cosmos flower is a portal into the greater cosmos. 

While at Headlands

While at headlands I will be experimenting with some new compositions I have the first glimmers of in my mind, and I will flesh out a new body of paintings that are in the earliest stages of conception. Being in a new place explodes my typical routine, and tends to allow for surprising evolutions in what I make, and the way I think and navigate the work and world. In addition to studio time, I will go on regular adventures painting outside. Painting Plein-air is a fun, peripheral part of my practice– it tends to help me get out of my cerebral mind and into my body, and shows me how to come in and out of being present within all of my senses- it’s also a great place to go with the flow, because its foundation is really in failure, and that’s a freeing place to play.