“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” — Banksy
My studio is a place of investigation — a space where questions take form through material and repetition. Each drawing or painting begins without a fixed outcome. What matters most is the search: the layering, erasing, redrawing, and re-seeing that allows unexpected images to emerge.
Whether working alone or alongside students, I approach making as inquiry — a way of thinking through materials, perception, and time. The goal isn’t resolution, but discovery.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work begins where language falters—at the edges of memory, dream, and imagination. I paint and draw to uncover what hides beneath the surface: shifting archetypes, shadowed narratives, and glimpses of something larger moving through us.
For years, my canvases have explored the psyche as a living landscape. Gestural marks, fractured forms, and atmospheric layers became disrupted portals—openings into the unconscious where the personal and the collective converge. Influenced by Jungian depth psychology and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow, I see each piece not as a fixed product but as a passage: a moment of being where chaos and coherence meet.
At the heart of this process is the pursuit of portals—visual, emotional, and psychological gateways that invite the viewer into spaces of mystery and transformation. Whether fractured portraits dissolving into abstraction or thresholds alive with unseen energy, these works are meditations on transition—between life and death, order and entropy, matter and energy.
Each piece is not an answer but an opening. A reminder that art’s role is not to resolve mystery, but to keep it alive.
My process is iterative and layered. I begin with spontaneous marks or quick sketches that invite chance. From there, I build and erase — pushing paint or graphite until new forms surface. I often return to earlier stages of a work, introducing disruption intentionally to test its structure.
I think of each surface as a conversation with time: gestures overlap like thoughts, edges blur like memory. What stays visible is as important as what gets buried. The result is an image that feels discovered rather than designed.
In the classroom, I apply the same approach I use in the studio — encouraging curiosity, failure, and iteration. I design assignments that unfold through process rather than prediction: projects that begin with observation, move into abstraction, and end in interpretation.
Teaching, for me, is a shared creative act. Each class becomes a studio of ideas — a place where experimentation leads to insight and where students learn to trust their own process. My teaching and studio practice form a continuous loop: what I learn from one always reshapes the other.