Most of my paintings begin with something that lingers—a memory, an image, a conversation, a relationship, or a question I can’t quite resolve. I often don’t understand why something has caught my attention at first. Painting becomes a way of staying with it long enough to find out.

I work in oil, acrylic, collage, ink, and other materials, moving freely between recognizable imagery and abstraction. I’m drawn mostly to the natural world and to familiar objects and relics from the past—people, animals, objects, places—and to the meanings they accumulate through memory, experience, and the stories we inherit. An image may begin with one association and become something entirely different as the painting develops.

My work is built through broad areas of color, layered lines, fragments of drawing and text, repetition, erasure, and revision. Images emerge, disappear, and return in altered forms. I’m interested in the space between what something appears to be and what it can come to hold: beauty and unease, attachment and loss, familiarity and uncertainty, sometimes existing in the same image at once.

I rarely know exactly where a painting is going when I begin, and I prefer it that way. I don’t use painting to illustrate something I have already decided. I use it to discover what I think—to follow an image, memory, or question until it leads somewhere I could not have planned in advance.

I studied Fine Arts at Adelphi University, completed graduate-level coursework in Art Therapy at Pratt Institute, and studied at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy, where I studied under pioneering Photorealist painter Audrey Flack.