Meditations on scarcity and sacredness, absence and abundance, these works sit between painting and object. Torn cloth suggests the act of hiding, revealing, or becoming; gold accents speak of hope like quiet prayer. Made from reclaimed drop cloth rather than traditional linen, these studies carry whispers of struggle giving way to creation, and ask us to examine how we assign value to material things as well as to our own internal conceptions of security.

Painted veils of shifting color suggest horizons glimpsed through the haze of memory, or the last moments of a dream as wakefulness arrives. Vast, atmospheric fields are bound tightly by thread — directional, but with no destination, like a deep breath held too long. In these works, containment becomes its own kind of tenderness, an act of preservation as much as control, the way we hold desperately onto moments of exquisite loveliness.

Built like altars not to gods but to the parts of ourselves we often keep hidden, these works examine symbols of identity, vitality, and decay where dried bits of flora stand in for the human soul: capable of immense beauty, but also of bruising, withering, and fading away. Each piece is assembled from discarded and found materials — oil-drenched flora, vintage dictionary entries, reclaimed surfaces, and string — becoming shrines to resilience and reckoning.

These works are intimate studies of a vast inner world — not portraits in a traditional sense, but emotional remnants suspended between assertion and dissolution. Layered with scraps of paper or canvas, fragments of vintage dictionary entries, pressed flowers and tape, these charcoal figures appear as if surfacing through memory itself: half-resolved, lingering on the edge of abstraction. Each piece reads as a confession pressed between pages of a scrapbook. Identity here is fragile — something we construct or inherit, and constantly push against.

My earliest oil paintings sought to reach the essence of place and environmental phenomena.