For me, painting is a vantage point: a position from which to see, contemplate, understand, and eventually create. Painting allows me to question not only myself, but also the world around me. It allows me the opportunity to negotiate preexisting and current definitions of who and what we are, and what reality is. Painting has no laws, only conventions. It is a form of negotiation, mediation, and intervention to help us discover who we are, what we are, and how we can be. The process of painting involves a back and forth action, not unlike a dialogue or debate. Through the making and un-making of forms, I abstract from what I see, sense, or touch. Painting offers moments of convergences and points of focus when mark-making tools or brushes, loaded with paint, meet the substrate. These meeting points become thresholds between ideas and form, interior and exterior, action and response, and self and other. During this painterly dialogue, I find myself seeking a union between thought and expression. My work always begins with the figure, more specifically the body. I use multiple figures and illusions of space to explore relationships that separate and connect the mind and body. I think of these relationships as being akin to thresholds between layers. Relationships form links and connections between the layers inside oneself and outside the body. The ambiguity that forms between the liminal layers is manifested in my paintings through a process of overlapping figurative forms. My oscillating forms make no decisive claim to being positive or negative space, rather they appear to fluctuate back and forth. The boundaries between the multiple body forms and their environment tends to collapse. In my painting it is unclear where one figure ends and another begins. This alludes to the pleasure and anxiety we struggle to balance in our psyches as two or more layers of experience converge and, as a result of this convergence, are transformed. As the individual figurative forms coalesce with each other and their ground, they metaphorically represent a sense of union. But, in their transformation, they have also lost some or all of their identity. Join the Facebook Event. Categories All Student Profile