I find it difficult to define the line between making art and living. It is like I am constantly squinting in life and blurring all the edges. I find myself unconsciously wearing, eating, feeling, photographing, living and painting the same colors, patterns and forms. I constantly get camouflaged in front of my work and find myself eating foods the same color as the pigments on my palette. My emotions match my brushwork and the landscapes I am surrounded by.

I am a painter that works passionately from the gut. I empathize with paint and treat it as the better half in our tumultuous relationship to create paintings together. Overwhelming anxiety, excitement, glee and devastation twist and pinch each other passionately as paint semblances guts and emotions extruding from fissures. I play and struggle when painting, and it is my goal to communicate that to others. Process becomes the subject, in which visual recreation of the painting activates the work so an audience can share similar thoughts and experiences I had. Once I depart from the painting, paint itself stands on its own to share our story and process.

Being painfully self-conscious of my identity, I am constantly searching to find answers to how I relate to the world and others while questioning why I make the choices I do. Culture, government, economy, socioeconomic status and personality all influence identity. Being raised in the Midwest with a consumer mentality, I learned that our identity is formed by what goods we choose to own and embrace. As I continue to search, I have come to believe that as individuals we embrace, struggle with, deny or indulge in how we identify ourselves in our culture. The goods we choose to own and how we treat them become signifiers to how we cope or thrive in our surroundings. My own indulgent choice to own paint and create paintings speaks of my personal struggle and embrace of forming my identity, as it simultaneously defines me as an artist.