Feeling emboldened and inspired with the completion of my first painting, I decided to wade into the unfamiliar medium of oils, starting with a series of 12” x 12” canvases.

With no formal training in oil painting, I attempt to approach each canvas with a Beginner’s Mind (lol), allowing my curiosity and intuition to guide me. I accept the filter of distortion that arises from my hand’s translation of the source image to the canvas. Rather than striving for total realism, I believe these “imperfections” reflect my particular subjectivity and ability to express it—similar to our experience of memory itself.

My paintings are deeply personal, typically cropped from my own photographs. These moments include me and my partner at a gay bar in Silverlake, years before we started dating; my beloved Shih Tzu, Olive; the two of them walking down a Brooklyn street; a pair of startled deer caught in the headlights on a country road near my childhood Indiana home; a revelatory first encounter with the sublime fast-food culture of Southern California. Each piece holds a memory, filtered through my perspective, and rendered in paint.