about the painting process

My art is equal parts in my control and out of it, as if I enter into a collaboration with the ink itself, the medium and art form. I begin the dialogue by choosing the color, marking with water the shape and confines in which I wish the ink to move. The ink then responds and reacts freely within the parameters that I have set. This form of art often feels like throwing the dice, a gamble. I never know what will flow, what the ink will decide to do and how it will dry.

Yet much deeper than haphazard creation, the flowing of the ink is an extension of my inner landscape. It often feels as if my own blood were the ink itself, bleeding from my fingers to flow onto the paper; unfolding, blossoming, stretching, communicating in a way that is impossible to predict. It’s akin to a spiritual, meditative process, connecting with my inner world that screams to be externalized and take form, flowing onto the paper in dazzling, sometimes terrifying ways. The finalized work often displays shapes that even resemble anatomy, organs, or cell biology. This only further supports this intrinsic/ extrinsic dialoguing, a sort of purification or ejection from my inner being via the use of color and abstract formulation. What you see on paper is the amalgamation of what I have been taking in, intuiting, processing inside... a tenderly confused expression, a cohesive yet chaotic burst of color that synthesizes what I have been digesting from the world around me. Within this abstract ink medium, with the yupo paper, with the starting point of a color in mind, I am able to unlock, express and exhale (often in surprise) what is inside of myself.

About me

I am an abstract visual artist who engages the public to gather qualitative data and paint based on that data. I’m also a software developer and photographer with an artist studio in Downtown Nashville, TN. I was formerly a French instructor at the University of Kentucky and was a part of an artist collective at the Bread Box, situated behind West Sixth Brewing company in Lexington, KY.