My lifelong interests –- art, music and science –are constantly being woven and rewoven into my paintings and works on paper. Because of my background as a musician, I have a strong feeling for musical metaphors. My interest in music is especially present both in terms of the visual intervals and patterns that appear in my work; physical engagement and a sense of performance is always part of my studio practice.

I am drawn to intersections: ideas that might seem to be at opposite ends of a continuum, like the organic and the geometric. My starting points vary: they can come from something personal, something glimpsed, from my experience of a piece of music, or increasingly, from reflections on Japanese aesthetics and philosophy. As a graduate student, I spent time around John Cage; his early influence, to this day, informs my studio practice of intention and chance.

In my current work, I am exploring themes of life’s impermanence with a deeper sense of contemplation and quiet reverence. The Japanese concept of mono no aware – the bittersweet awareness of transience – has become central to my practice. Working with collage, encaustic, ink and charcoal, I layer and reconfigure fragments of earlier work, honoring what has come before while allowing it to transform into something new. This process of tearing, folding and reassembling mirrors the way memory reshapes experience, the way time both preserves and alters.

My work attempts to create environments that I want to find in myself: They represent internal worlds that I am trying to externalize and share. My pieces are minimal and balanced, yet full of rhythm and asymmetry. However life’s beauty is expressed, however it is felt, has to do with a feeling of calm, inside and out – a quality that feels increasingly essential in these uncertain times. I love what the late jazz musician Charlie Haden said, “The artist’s job is to bring beauty into a conflicted world.”

Each work and each series is a visual diary of my explorations. My ideas evolve as I apply my sense of color and play to the images and materials at hand. I may start with an idea in mind, but somewhere between intention and chance I find new directions. The practice itself – the daily ritual of working with my hands, the meditative repetition of layering and mark making — has become as important as the finished piece. I’m never sure how a painting will look until it’s finished, and this not-knowing is where the work truly lives.