Artist Statement

I paint because art can visualize ideas in ways that words cannot. My earliest influences were muralists like Diego Rivera whose work, such as La Gran Tenochtitlan, taught me the power of art to tell stories.

My work is shaped by a lifetime of experience living and working in systems and settings where authority often went unquestioned. Through painting, I revisit those systems to reveal what they obscure or deflect. Born and raised in Chicago, I have witnessed both the human cost of violence and the ideologies that normalize them. My paintings unravel that normalization by visualizing systems I cannot accept and the collectives working to dismantle them.

I work in a variety of mediums but pivoted largely to oil paint whose slow drying times enable me to work on three or four series at a time. My process begins digitally, within the minimalist interface of R-Studio. I treat its plot window as a blank canvas, coding geospatial maps and abstract scatterplots to generate unique visual forms. I transpose these visual forms onto canvas or wood panel through projection, stenciling, or layered mark-making. Paintings like Panel 05 or Color Logics originated from plots I produced in R-studio. Other paintings, like my Encrypted Message series, did not. Whether grounded in concepts or emotions, each painting visualizes hidden forces and renders them open to interpretation.