About

I work in two series. The first reflects my life in Missouri. I've always considered myself a homebody, but in truth, much of my adult life has been nomadic. Like many people, the variety of places I’ve lived has been near panoramic, from a garage studio in California, to a pine paneled room in Norway, to every iteration of apartment in Chicago and New York. For me, fullness and personal growth went hand in hand with movement.
I was born and raised in California but I spent at least part of each summer in the Midwest. My Mom’s family is from Kansas City and every time I left I had a deep longing for its intimate hedgerows and big skies. In 2020, when I landed in the old familial lake cabin I grew up visiting as a kid, the decision to permanently relocate was an obvious one. For the first time in my life the depth of experience I’d always associated with movement I found in stillness. The landscape is a big part of that for me and this series is an homage to that change.
Two figures continually appear in these images, that of myself and that of my dear friend, Lissa. We have known each other a long time, having met when we lived in the Bay Area. Lissa and I reconnected in entirely serendipitous circumstances, having each independently moved to Missouri in 2020. As our friendship deepened, so did my relationship to the land and my perception of this place I call home. This body of work takes our likenesses to explore different aspects of life in Missouri, from post-Roe trigger bans to the softness of a more earth-based lifestyle.
The figurative images began with the painting State’s Rights. It is my first overtly political painting and I consider it the nexus of the series. I began this painting when Roe v. Wade was repealed. That women lost the constitutional right to bodily autonomy in "the land of the free" struck me, as it did many others, as a grossly unjust and inconsistent interpretation of the law. In Missouri particularly this meant that in most cases the only abortion available was and still is self-abortion and that the right to retain control over one's own body means risking death.
The other figurative paintings in this series address a feminist existentialism from various angles. Throughout my life I have been confronted by writers, teachers, artists, and peers with challenges to my status as equal in my humanity to men. These challenges are so persistent and so repetitive I have at times wondered: am I as human as a man after all? While I have to some degree passively internalized their views I continue to actively reject them. They are the inheritance of patriarchy. In these paintings I want to depict women as I see myself: as human, as thoughtful and capable, whether clothed or unclothed, weary or active.

The second series is an affectionate parody of rock art. Each painting adapts a classically driven technique to likenesses of contemporary musicians and their song lyrics. These paintings explore the durability of fame and culture by removing pop icons from their proposed zeitgeists and re-contextualizing them in the unexpected rawness of the natural world.