My current work explores the idea of what it means to be a person. I have always drawn and painted faces in the past, but I have recently shifted to working more on full figure portraiture. I create my work to express myself and the way I see the world around me. I have not always had the gift of communicating with other people very well and art allows me to do just that in my own way. I seek to better understand people through my artistic practice of drawing them. My ultimate goal is to share with people my perspective of the world and the people that inhabit it.
All of my most successful pieces are created spontaneously, on a whim of inspiration. They take to time make, but my decisions on what I want to create, how I want to create it, and how I want to present it are based off of my own intuition. I use acrylic paint for my pieces because I feel that it is a very flexible medium, which allows me to make these spontaneous decisions. I can choose to add layers or texture without having to wait too long and the process doesn’t require a ton of set-up, allowing me to start and finish an idea as fast as I can imagine it. However, I have enjoyed experimenting with drawing and the use of charcoal and conte. Though I feel that the pieces I make with these mediums are less refined and complete. There have been times when I feel that charcoal and/or conte help me express whatever I may need better than with the use of acrylic paint, since they are even more flexible materials and require no setup or planning. I have been exploring adding more personal touches to my work as well. In some of my pieces, I have included parts of my personal journal to connect myself to the people in my portraits. Overall, I use quite a bit of acrylic paint, even in my charcoal drawings, as it is what I feel works best to produce the content I want to share.
When someone looks at my art, I want them to know what I was thinking in the process of creating it and I hope that they will connect with me in that way. My art brings me closer to people and I hope that it will bring people closer to me and each other. Recently, I have been exploring people and their hobbies. My goal with these pieces is to capture people in the moment when they are fully themselves. Whether it is through skateboarding or playing the guitar, we all have something we enjoy doing, even when no one is around to watch. I am trying to capture those moments when people are not trying to play the right note or land the right trick to please an audience, but rather to please themselves.