There were many lessons I learned from a certain challenging assignment while I was in school. I learned to loosen up, to not put so much pressure on my work, and to experiment with color. My love of studying color stems from this project. What you might not know about my work is that I often paint the first layer of my paintings with garishly bright colors. I’m talking hot pinks, neon oranges, the most awful yellows, and cartoon blues. But then I layer softer colors on top of that. And then I keep layering. The result is a painting that appears soft, but has an inner glow from those first layers. It is through this process that I am able to feel what I am painting, and how people who see my work derive their emotional responses.

his collection of paintings is the deep, long exhale after a period of major life change and the busiest, most jam-packed schedule of my life. With a brain that finally has the space to create again, I found rest in returning to my original inspiration: land, sky, and the wide open spaces in between. I have fallen into rest in these places; they rejuvenate me like no other place can.

These paintings signify a return to an old place in a new personal context. While many things have changed since last finishing a painting, this place has stayed the same. Now I’m seeing it with fresh eyes, and looking even closer into the relationship between the land and the sky. I want to capture the dual feelings of constancy and change, of fleeting moments in a permanent place. The colors of my sky might be changing, but its colors are always beautiful.

It’s been a while since I wrote about my work, about my life, about my thoughts. It’s been a while, probably too long. When I had to talk about my work and write about my work in school, these words came easier, and it seemed like I had more to say. It’s funny how that works; the more you talk, the more you have to say.

Maybe I'm just figuring it out? Maybe the past couple of years out of school have been a transitional time, a time where I get to keep making, not really knowing what direction it’s headed, but knowing that I can’t stop or else I won’t be able to start again. It’s the necessity of creating, rather than the need for the finished product. I can’t lose that side of my work! I have been so focused on selling and the post-production aspect of my practice, that it is easy to lose sight of the making itself.

One of my former professor would give us the same challenge with each new semester: make something you have never done before and never seen before. Every time she introduced the assignment, it was usually met with protest and anger. How is that even possible? How are we supposed to do that? But I’m a landscape/portrait/abstract painter! I can’t do something else but that, right?

Capital T, capital F - The Farm. Located in the heart of South Texas, an hour and a half southwest of Houston, it’s set on roughly 80 acres of the the gentlest rolling land. Nearly-historic oak trees and stately groves of pecan trees grow their roots in its ground. And on a cloudless night, the sky is the clearest window to the stars that you can’t find within big city limits. It started as a place where my family could keep their hands busy and scratch the itch to get out of the city. What I didn’t expect was that it would change my life and my artwork in the best way. 

The Farm came into my life freshman year of TCU. I was a budding art student pushing all kinds of boundaries with my work - cake slices revealing new worlds within! Waterfalls gushing from conch shells! Some pretty earth-shattering stuff, right? Ha. Then I went to Italy for a semester, which I wouldn’t trade for anything, but came back a little tired of cherubs and Renaissance Italian dignitaries, so I started painting abstract paintings.My dad began beekeeping at The Farm, so the honeycomb shape became the basis of this period of abstracts. They kept me busy for a semester, but I knew they wouldn’t be “my thing.” Still, slowly, The Farm was creeping into my work.