Artist Statement

Female forms, table scenes, food, autobiographical narratives, patterns, color, and abstracted words, these are all reoccurring motifs woven into my expressively colorful canvases and woodcuts. My focus vacillates from social political themes of identity to creating visual memoirs, mining the world and personal histories, as an artist ‘anthropologist’ in this case armed with a visual vocabulary. Focused on synthesizing myth and contemporary life through the female lens, my work follows and celebrates female strength, resilience, and creation. Highly informed by collaborating with material, such as utilizing woodcuts and the printmaking process within the DNA of my acrylic painting practice. I create wood assemblage figures and installations in addition to my painting to bridge the gap between our world and my own.

Symbolism, mysticisms, folk art, and traditional female domestic practices all play a role in my cannon, along with inspirations such as Alice Neal, Pierre Bonnard, and Paul Gauguin. My work is a means of digesting the visual and emotional world. I create modern archetypes, celebrating and illuminating the contemporary state of being within the world. Long inspired by having grown up in the kitchen with her my mother and grandmother, my obsession with food as a means of communication and love, my fascination with identity is deeply entrenched in the sharing of the meal and the theater of the dinner table.

My work integrates social commentary with personal referents in a complex visual form that includes pattern and color to convey what cannot be said in the usual dyadic forms of language. My paintings express the density and diversity of the world as I experience it. Each scene is a moment of time filled with many cultural attitudes, current and historical, personal and divergent. Because of my lifelong issues with my learning disabilities, I have always been drawn to other modes of expression. I have struggled to integrate my own disposition and unique aptitude into strength and wholeness. Being an “outsider,” I am committed to understanding “otherness," both personally and collectively. In that sense, my work is an ongoing quest to better integrate our diversity.