Portraiture is a way for me to understand both myself and the people around me. I paint friends and people I know well, using these relationships to explore how identity develops through intimacy, shared experience, and time spent together. Many of my paintings focus on friendship—moments of play, care, or stillness between women—suggesting how early bonds continue to shape our emotional lives. My paintings often begin with vision boards made from film stills, historical paintings, and personal snapshots. Working closely with each sitter, I build scenes that feel both staged and familiar, like something remembered. I’m drawn to cinematic lighting, the tactile richness of Northern Renaissance and Dutch painting, and the visual language of contemporary image culture. Color and gesture set the emotional tone, while layered oil surfaces and compressed space allow the figure to become a site where identity, intimacy, and memory remain fluid. I plan to spend the remainder of 2026 developing a new body of work toward a solo exhibition in 2027. In graduate school, I plan on continuing to build body of work that furthers my dialogue with the art community and help solidify my visual vocabulary, establish connections with galleries and start the process of finding long term representation. I want to continue to challenge myself as a painter. In the future I hope to teach painting in higher education and maintain an active studio practice making new work for exhibitions and annual shows. Finding that equilibrium between teaching, community, and steady studio output is how I see myself as an artist.
