“Drawing from my experience with extreme emotional highs and lows, primary themes in my work are the beauty and power of the human mind and, exploration of the self, and human connection. Consequently, my motivation to create work is to express the intensity of certain emotions, memories, and dreams using the specifics of the human figure. My paintings combine portraiture with non-objective environments and are saturated in fiercely contrasting warm and cool colors. I enjoy creating heightened and dramatic color palettes that push my work in a contemporary direction. My work is meant to help those with heavy hearts feel seen.

I play with perception and contrast in my Blue Window series. Looking into the blue creates a mood drastically different than looking at the paintings as a whole. I equate this to looking through a window into a life that is not one’s own. The windows are a stark break from the organic forms, and they ask the viewer to consider empathy. They remind us of what we can’t know.

As a young adult, I’ve realized that, yes, painting is what I do, but being an artist is who I am. It defines and explains me in more ways than I realized in the past. If I could give one healing statement to my younger self, I would tell her that she’s an artist. That’s her “why.””