Artist Statement

Each artwork manifests itself by using the artist as an instrument to turn into existence — to exist. I serve what wants to come alive. My practice moves between abstract and psychological surrealism, and every painting begins not with a subject but with a force: a feeling that compounds inside me until it has to be released, unleashed, given a body.

I paint primarily with acrylic on unstretched cloth, working large and often by hand. Cloth breathes in a way that canvas doesn't — it holds tension and release at the same time, which is what the work is about. The scale is deliberate: I want the viewer to stand inside the painting, not in front of it. The palette comes from birds — the impossible colours of hummingbirds, the iridescence of a wing turning in light — mixed with the rising feminine I keep discovering in myself, and with the colour of the earth underneath all of it. Infinite life force translated into pigment.

NOR — the ongoing series that gives its name to much of my recent work — is the identity of non-identity. Words define; they draw a border around a thing and separate it from everything it is not. Colour and tone don't. Colour is timeless. NOR can mean now, and it can mean forever; it can mean the space between two things and the thing that contains them both. It is a painting of what refuses to be named, which is, I think, the most honest thing a painting can do.

Much of the work is also about reunion — the impossible, immortal reunion of two spirits, of a self with the self it has been longing for, of a viewer with something they had forgotten they knew. Someone waking from death to find the one they loved. That desire is not decorative in my paintings; it is structural. It is what pulls the composition forward.

I remember standing in front of Delaroche's Execution of Lady Jane Grey. I looked long enough that something shifted, and a question arrived in me: was Lady Jane executed so that the painting could exist, or does the painting exist because Lady Jane was executed? The answer came in a single word — colours. That was the illumination. The moment of being seen, and of seeing. That is how eternity happens: not in the event, but in the moment the event becomes visible through colour. My mastery upgraded in that room.

I don't believe art should gatekeep its illumination. Illumination is what makes a real audience — it is quietly addictive, and it builds a long bond between painter and viewer. If the question I asked in front of Lady Jane sounds absurd to someone, they are not the collector of this work; if the question lights them up the moment they hear it, they already are. I would ordinarily say art for art's sake — but more precisely: art should illuminate. It should turn a light on inside the person standing in front of it, and leave it on after they walk away.

That is what I am trying to make. Paintings that illuminate. Paintings that reunite.