I paint people whose faces and bodies reveal a lived life. Concepts of pretty, not pretty, serious, happy, sad, are not relevant to my work. My intention goes deeper: to declare the holiness and mystery of each individual.

Visual tension and a sense of movement are essential to my work. Layering paint and the use of a patterned or flat background forces the viewer’s eye to move restlessly across the canvas, hopefully resulting in the skin appearing vivid and alive. I strive to leave fabricated emotion out of my work. Sentimentality robs the viewer of the complex experience of art. With this in mind, I request that the sitter pose with their facial muscles relaxed and non-emotive. The viewer then has room to come forward, move into the painting without being told how to feel.

Humans are hungry to have our great big experience of being alive named or distilled into something concrete. Although my work can elicit some degree of discomfort in the viewer, such an opportunity to deepen one's own experience is what art, in the best case, affords.