Painting is how I express feelings that are stirring below the surface. I do not always know the connection between my life and my art. I look at my work as others do and search for meaning. I explore losing a father at a young age and the sadness associated with that loss, a childhood life of being lower middle class but feeling poor, a difficult mother-daughter relationship. I am not sure how the dots connect but I do know that strong feelings are the undercurrent that appears on the canvas. While I cannot always identify my emotional source for each painting, I do know that it is my respect and intense feelings for people and their circumstances that dictates the narratives of my images, ofttimes depicting loss, sadness and raw emotion.
I seek to record a poignant, at times photographic, moment and allow it to seep into the viewer’s mind so that the audience rather than the artist completes the story. Through these images, I hope to ensure identification with and compassion for the protagonist even without words, simply because emotion is universal. My goal is to leave the audience with a desire to spend real time with the people in my paintings, to imagine them as figures with whom they have genuine intimacy.