I am inspired by the interior landscape of the human figure and I am compelled to make art in order to feel understood. My art is not smiling, pretty, passive or silent. My art is moody, earthy, and corporeal. The many layers, bones, and structures beneath the surface are fueled by my interest in the sciences of human movement and behavior, and how I can entice them into visual conversation, manipulating them with the emotionality of color. I hope to give voice to the intricate ways we communicate with gesture, expression, and emotion by scraping, pushing, pulling encaustic wax paint around with heat and carving tools, embedding prints and drawings of figures, tearing paper shapes and molding a textured relief of abstracted bones and tissue with stratified layers of molten wax and pigment. I often begin with a loose concept as I lay down layers of wax with a brush, fusing them with a torch or iron. Then I drip, draw, paint, collage and mix other oil-based media to lend structure and detail to the composition. Scraping down through the many layers of paint is my personal exploration of the ideals and expectations by which we measure ourselves that can be found in these anatomical and structurally inspired archetypes.

This search for self exposes the alchemy of the encaustic process: marks, divots and scratches on the wax surface become a 'skin' of experience, as individual as each of us. Spaces expand and contract when revealed between floating translucent layers of color. Layers come and go, eroding and building a complex portrait of who we are in a 'call and response' process that helps me understand myself as I relate to those around me.