Making,
teaching,
seeing.

Artist's Statement

My work lives as a series of multimedia sketchbooks I've been updating and adding to daily for years, accumulating observations and formal play. This ongoing practice is the core of my work, a lifelong meditative commitment to observation and finding language for what I see, from life, pop culture, and art history. The images are dreamlike offerings of my own recollections and visual thought processes.

I was trained academically and keep this structural rigor always visible in my work. Running alongside it, and made more obviously intentional by it, is a desire to embrace the naive; flattened forms, cartoon outlines, vibrant pop color, and childlike joy. I keep the seams visible in the work and let this contrast between the varied languages highlight the intentional choice of using each side.

This results in paintings that hold multiple levels of representation at once, flat and spatial, realistic and graphic, observed and invented. I keep this ambiguity to give the viewer space to move within the image and to flex their imagination as they work to resolve the scene I invite them into, mixing the immediately accessible with quieter formal work beneath.

The word I keep returning to is play. I want to enjoy this as a practice I never finish, and want the work to open a similar space for whoever is looking. It's a welcome to wander and notice what draws them in, moving through the attractions of the pop to the more detailed formal work underneath, slowing attention and giving them time to focus as I did.

Teaching Philosophy

In a world increasingly oriented towards product and output, I believe the processes of drawing and painting hold value that cannot be replicated. The focused attention of study, the pleasure of mark-making, and the way artmaking can be used as a tool for processing thought are all invaluable for a learner — over the pure ability to create a polished product as an AI now can. My teaching is built around that belief: that process is not simply a means to an end, but one of the most important things to teach in itself.

I establish my classroom as a space where students feel I am an approachable figure they can bring their unique interests to. Collaborative projects are central to how I build community — having students rotate around a set of canvases, trading artworks for others to finish, and giving each other prompts and directions, creating space for direct peer engagement and exposure to styles outside their own.

It is equally important to me that students leave my class with sustainable habits for a lifelong practice. I weave time management and physical self-care into lessons, as the demands of long studio work are real and developing artists rarely think about them early enough. I weight assignments heavily towards self-directed study — from observation of their own interests, to engaging with archival materials, to actively hunting for new contemporary artists to explore.

Across all this, I try to cultivate joy in the process of making. Technical struggle and unmet expectations are a natural part of developing as an artist, and I ask students to give themselves grace. In my classroom, genuine effort regardless of skill level is the most valued input. It brings me real joy to watch skills develop and see young artists begin to find their voices.