My first memory of color: a fluorescent orange square spray-painted on the concrete sidewalk in front of my apartment. I was three years old. I felt a buzz. I remember thinking it might taste good to lick.

This visceral encounter, sensation unmediated by language, anchors my practice.

I work from two fundamental truths. First: all experience is embodied. We perceive the world through a body extended in space. Second: all perception is subjective, filtered through memory, identity, culture, and emotion. These two forces, embodiment and subjectivity, interact to form a reality in constant flux.

In the studio, I approach painting as a dialogue between discipline and improvisation. I mediate the language of painting with play. I layer oil, acrylic washes, flour, wax, canvas collage, drop cloths—materials that invite both control and unpredictability. My process is physical and intuitive, evolving through an interplay of thought and touch.

This material framework allows me to explore deeply personal content: raising my daughter; the paradoxical joy and physical toll from years working on Sol LeWitt wall drawings; and my complex relationship to identity—culturally unmoored in America, yet grounded in my working-class Chicago roots.

Abstraction offers freedom. Within its open language, I articulate a kind of time and history by layering paint, suggesting that color exist as space, tracing movement with lyrical gesture. My paintings hover between music, landscape, and body—sometimes all three at once. In this world, the familiar becomes strange. Meaning is not fixed but renegotiated through sensation and reflection.

I return often to that first encounter with the fluorescent orange square, where sensation, curiosity, and attraction converged. In that moment—before language—I found the most direct way of experiencing the world. Through the body first, then through the mind that interprets it. I want my paintings to invite viewers into that same space of embodied discovery, where color and form speak directly to the senses, reminding us of what it means to be human.