Q: Your artistic process often involves exploring memory and sensory experiences. How do you approach translating intangible elements like light and sound into your art?

A: All the senses are related and intertwining to me, but color is at the root of it all. Color is so sensory and symbolic, it evokes sound, scent, texture, temperature, taste, etc., and is always the thing that exists first and foremost in my visual memory even when I can’t remember anything else. It’s usually the first thing I decide when I’m building an image. I’ve always had a vivid memory, but ones that stay with me the most and come to mind often have a very distinct color or light environment attached to them.

I remember once lying in the snow at night when I was about 11, looking up at the sky in my front yard and thinking how strange it was that the air was so densely quiet and looked so brown and warm. There’s no real story behind it, but some pressure change or weather event must have created this odd light environment that I can’t get out of my mind. Specific color relationships also make me think of certain events or time periods from my past. I remember my childhood being full of green-gold and purple (I’m probably remembering light through the trees in my backyard in the late afternoons), and when I lived in Philadelphia during college, the whole world was grey, peachy pink, and a rusty red-brown. When I’m making images, most of my time and energy goes into finding the right color relationships that match the memory I’m trying to convey.

Q: "Home" is a recurring theme in your work. How has your perception of "home" evolved over the years, and how is this evolution reflected in your art?

A: When I was little, "home" meant a very specific house filled with specific things and people. My sense of self and belonging was completely rooted to that place. When we left that house in my teen years, it gutted me in a way that I didn’t expect and wasn’t fully conscious of until much later. I’ve lived in different houses since then, some much harder to leave than others. Now I understand that it’s not the physical place itself, it’s who I was and how I felt when I was there. It’s easy to take a meaningful event or feeling and attach it to the location where it happened. I don’t particularly miss my childhood bedroom, but I miss sitting on my bed with my sister looking out the window at night. I don’t quite remember our kitchen layout, but I remember the yellow walls and the sound of splattering oil and my mom’s electric mixer.

Houses are self portraits. Every physical space that I’ve occupied has added to my sense of self in some way, and vice versa. We set up our house to meet our needs and communicate something about ourselves, and likewise the house quietly changes us, our patterns, our behaviors. The house evolves with us, and when we leave, we become different and so do they. I recently heard someone say, “we’re all mosaics of every person and place we’ve loved”.

I’m not exactly the same as I was when I lived in my childhood home, but I keep little bits. My kitchen is still yellow, and I still like sitting on my bed and looking out the window at night. I do have an aesthetic love of houses and architecture, but when I make pictures of home, it’s less about the place itself and more about what my life was when I was there. There are a few paintings from 2023 that involve the house I lived in a few years ago. In real life it’s a rowhouse sharing walls with other identical models. I felt very isolated in that house, so in the paintings it’s alone and unattached. If you were to visit the house you’d recognize it from the painting, but the setting I placed it in is purely symbolic.

Q: Working primarily from memory and dreams, how do you navigate the challenges of rendering spaces and objects you can’t physically revisit? Do you find the process more liberating or restrictive?

A: This process started out feeling frustrating to me, but it’s turned into something very fun, intuitive, and freeing that I deeply enjoy. I was trained as an observational painter, so navigating away from that way of working was a huge challenge (especially since I really enjoy detailed rendering and wanted to preserve that part of my practice). I moved away from direct observation because my love of “realism” makes me very prone to copying what’s in front of me without paying much attention to what I’m actually contributing to it. I felt like I was forsaking some honesty in favor of visual accuracy, which feels more like a camera’s job and not a painter’s. I have two parts to my process, what I call a collection/research phase, and a working phase. I spend a lot of my day-to-day life just looking and recording information when I see something I like. I’m collecting data, basically. It could be written notes about the color of the sky, a small study in gouache or colored pencil, or lately I’ve been building small models of rooms or buildings to use as visual aids.

Sometimes I take photos, though I don’t like working from or relying on them too much. I often just stare and will myself to remember the color of, for example, a lightbulb, which only works sometimes. All this information goes into a mental catalogue that builds my understanding of how things behave visually, and I can refer back to it when I’m actually working. It’s become very intuitive, and I’ve started to remember certain visual patterns that help me “create” information that I don’t have references for. This method scratches an academic itch I have without making me feel like I’m restricted. I have a deeply analytical way of working, but my artistic interests are emotional and personal, and this is a way that I can indulge both parts of my brain.

Q: Your work explores themes of belonging and solitude. Do you find yourself drawn to these contrasts naturally, or is it a conscious choice in your creative process?

A: I think I was always drawn to these ideas naturally, but it’s now become a conscious choice and point of interest for me. I’ve always had a strong connection to my childhood and recall those years of my life very vividly. They were punctuated by a lot of very intense and unadulterated emotions, sometimes good and sometimes not. Very incandescent and giddy joy, deep fear or dread, the warm fuzzies, the intense sadness or loneliness.

I think these are just human things and we feel them more honestly and readily when we’re small. I love how potent those emotions were when I was little, and tend to grasp onto moments when I still feel them today. It’s beautiful to feel, and there’s something about that that exists at the very core of my artistic practice.

Q: Your paintings often have a narrative quality that feels deeply personal. How do you balance storytelling with abstraction in your work?

A: In my studio, storytelling is all about composition and color. I like these large aesthetic devices that draw you in long enough to notice smaller details. I’m a big fan of movies, children’s book illustrations, and religious iconography in medieval and mannerist art. My favorites in these categories have a way of setting up tableau-style compositions that lead you through a narrative in a very intentional and almost theatrical way. They are less rooted in naturalism and more in symbolic imagery and color. 

 love symmetry as a device to tell a story or convey hierarchy. Symmetrical compositions can feel comforting and stable, like Clement Hurd’s illustrations in the book “Goodnight Moon”, or it can create an artificial, almost uneasy absurdity, like in many Wes Anderson films. Hieronymous Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” has a weird balance between the stable symmetry of the landscape versus the chaotic and lush clusters of figures, and this creates something very fantastical and epic.

Religious iconography is fascinating because it’s consistent and meant to convey specific narratives and information to people who may be illiterate, or otherwise not privy to the story. The Holy Spirit is almost always depicted as a dove, and in Old Testament works, God often appears as a ray of light, fire, wind, or some natural element rather than a physical person. I am a religious outsider myself, “illiterate” in that way, but knowing these patterns makes the images easy to interpret and digest like a game or puzzle. I think about those ideas a lot in my own work, and have some objects or animals that I reuse over and over to convey a certain idea.

This is more for myself than anyone else–my stories are obviously personal, and so I can’t expect any viewer to have an interpretation that’s identical to my intent. I enjoy hearing what narratives people derive from my work based on their own stories, and I like creating images that balance specific and vague information. My favorite pieces of art or media are ones that invite questions without answering all of them.

Q: As someone who's been teaching Art, what advice would you give to emerging artists who are struggling to find their unique voice and balance personal narrative with artistic expression?

A: The best advice I can give to a young artist is to practice, be honest, and to know and accept that your path won’t be a straight one. It’s a wiggly line, and your voice and goals will change as you do. It took me a long time to settle into the type of images I’m making now, and to figure out what I am trying to say with them. I'm still figuring that out, but that's part of my love of the process. Even though I consider my career a steady one, it’s not effortlessly so.

I go through periods of change and upheaval where my old favorite ideas seem shaky, or my images and brushwork feel hollow. It still rattles me sometimes, but I’ve realized that this process is cyclical and a natural part of growth. I think a perfect analogy is a thread running through fabric. My thread ducks in and out of sight, but I know it's never gone for good. I will find it again, but only if I push the needle back up. Keep stitching. Keep making stuff, and don’t worry if it’s not all good. Art-making is like any other skill–it won’t develop without time and conscious effort. “Talent” is just hard work and consistent practice.

All this said, an easy trap to fall into is practicing without balance. When I was in school, I fell under the very romantic assumption that, in order to be able to call myself an artist, I had to be making art constantly. As in, every hour and minute that I could. In hindsight, this was not just unrealistic, but also unhealthy. Finding moderation in your practice is essential for growth. I’m very lucky that I can do this full time, but as much as I love what I do, I can’t do it at the expense of my mental or physical health. Giving myself time to rest and live a life outside of my studio is part of what allows me to consistently practice, to come back to it every day.

Writing about my own work has also been immensely helpful for me. I start most days in the studio by taking 10 or 15 minutes to write about what I’m working on, what I’m thinking about, or what problems I’m facing in my work. No one reads it, but it’s just to organize and record my thoughts. When I’m feeling stuck, it often helps me to reread my notes. I usually find threads or ideas that get me back on track, things that I might not have noticed or been conscious of even while writing them. Even this interview has helped me realize and verbalize things that I may not have otherwise.