As an artist, my painting has become closely intertwined with travel.  I am interested in the idea of capturing a time, a place, an essential experience of travel and manipulating it until the painting becomes a new experience in itself.  My motives for travel reveal the motives for my painting, as well.  I travel to escape the mundane, to plunge myself into the new, the unfamiliar, the challenging.  I travel to take home something new; to reawaken the spontaneity that my tightly wound schedule suffocates.  I travel, and I paint, to push myself past the ordinary, to learn about myself so that I may shape myself.  

I am interested in self-expression through landscape painting, in which emotion amplifies the forms and colors of the landscape until they become an exaggeration of nature’s reality.  Color’s ability to intoxicate, to stimulate a loss of control, a loss of focus, and a loss of self fascinates me.  It is the state of not-self the hyperbolic landscape induces in which I am interested.

Travel also induces a state of not-self, as it is both an escape from reality and enables an amplification of identity –because it lifts the boundaries of reality.  The freedom of creating myself anew in a new place is seductive to me—the ability to remold my character, my appearance, and my self to fit my desires and my needs in the present moment.  I paint landscapes of my travel experiences because both travel and painting offer me a state of complete self absorption—a state of not-self that is exhilarating and freeing for me.  Painting gives me this intoxicating freedom that I crave.

As a graduate of the University of Virginia,  I am using my art to celebrate the beauty of the school that shaped the way I see the world.  My travels began in Charlottesville, and so with my recent works I am turning back to the beginning, back to the point of inspiration, back to Virginia.

 

The Art

 

Read about the Alumni Association Art Award

"to be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. never stop fighting."

-e.e. cummings