Artist Statement
I have been making art all of my life. I was initially attracted to classicism and art of the Renaissance. The technical skills I developed and my capacity to depict people, poses, and things led to people commissioning me to do portraits.
However, I was looking for more, something more spiritually rewarding and redemptive, something beyond the illustration of anatomically correct representations. I became increasingly interested in representing people’s emotional states, psychological depth, and the intensity of the human experience.
As a result, I found myself attracted to the work of the German Expressionists, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, and Kathe Kollwitz. In addition, living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was impacted by Bay Area Figurative artists and the significance of their conflation of the formal strategies of Abstract Expressionism with representations of the world around them. However, if these identifications and affinities resonate in my work, they do so through my own personal desire to explore and understand a range of human sensitivities.
In the work, this is articulated through an economy of color, light and shadows, and compositional structures that allow me to contemplate psychological tensions, moods, and conundrums, as a means of exploring the essence of our shared humanity beyond our differences, in an effort to understand myself and my connectedness to the people, places, and things that constitute my lived experience of the world.
Artist Background
Academy of Art University
Master of Fine Arts, 2006