Artist Statement

I have always moved through the world with a creative eye, shaping meaning from color, gesture, and form long before I had the language for it. As an artist, my practice is both a return and a reckoning: a return to the act of making that has lived in me since childhood, and a reckoning with the world I inhabit as a queer person in an urban landscape, shaped by the beauty and rupture of life in Chicago.

My work exists in conversation with both the old masters and the modern visionaries. I study with reverence, absorbing classical techniques and painterly traditions, while allowing myself to be unmade and remade by the immediacy of mark-making, the fluidity of watercolor, the density of oil, and the experimental freedom of mixed media. These materials help me translate memory, tension, and spirit into something tangible, something viewers can hold with their eyes and feel with their own inner language.

I am especially drawn to the liminal: the spaces between identity and expectation, city and self, the sacred and the scarred. My art often evokes the layered realities of queerness, urban living, and transformation—not as fixed statements, but as inquiries. The canvas becomes a site of becoming, a map of where I’ve been and a possibility of where we all might go.

Ultimately, I want my work to invite pause. I want it to stir something in the gut before the mind catches up. Whether through a single brushstroke or a chaotic burst of layered texture, I hope viewers feel both held and disrupted—reminded of the complexity of being, the tenderness of survival, and the radical potential of beauty in all its forms.

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I continue to refine my practice and currently study at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Morton College, and The Oak Park Art League.