about me

I began painting in part on a whim and in part out of spite. The whim story is that I was out to dinner with a friend in college and saw a craft store across the parking lot. I was in the midst of a pretty light course load and usually bored in my tiny college town, so I wandered in and picked up their cheapest set of acrylic paints in hopes that I might find something fun to fill my time. The spite story is that I went to public schools in the South for my k-12 education that were far more interested in producing engineers and football stars than funding the arts, and thus never once had an art class or even as much as a period of elementary school. I had long thought painting might be fun and was in the middle of a fantastic course on art and literature in the Soviet Union where I became enamored with Marc Chagall and art as resistant expression, and finally felt the space and freedom to explore this long-suppressed curiosity.

I have been painting on and off since then, in early 2011. Over the years, it has become almost a form of therapy for me: a reflective and meditative space to explore moves and new beginnings, breakups and new loves, femininity and emotion, history and magic in the world around me. I usually gravitate toward painting women, emotion, and scenery in more impressionistic styles, and have recently begun toying with the chaotic, emotional processing that creeps up in dreams. I primarily use oil paints. This aside, though, I consider myself a very young, new, and part-time artist (by day, I am an academic), and I am still exploring and developing my artistic identity.

I hope find some joy and meaning in the art on this page, as I have.