Artist Statement.

As a developing artist, I continue to find my voice, purpose, and style of work. With the current work I produce, most of my pieces are oil paintings, charcoal drawings, and using different surfaces, like masonite. Over the years I have worked on canvas, but found the texture and buoyancy of the surface to be annoying and wanted a stiffer, smoother surface. With each medium, I tend to have a different style, subject, and influence for the work. Oil paint can be considered this fleshy medium, where exploring with the paint texture and the expansive colors, with even just the basic colors can be expressive. Drawing with charcoal has this other worldly use than oil painting. It’s almost like I can be two different artists with the two, or combine them and find a common ground. Many artists, like Jenny Saville and Leonora Carrington have influenced my art making in forms of inspiration and combination. Leonora Carrington is a surrealist artist which is an art design I gravitate towards since most of my work is inspired by dreams, or nightmares that I have had. With drawing, I find more of a realism perspective to be effective. Charcoal helps create detail and capture light and shadow, especially when working with figurative drawings. In painting, I like to create patterns and repetition, linking one painting to another to help give them a little tie to each other. Charcoal gives me the opportunity to create contrast, white space, and proportion. Although the style of my work changes with each medium, I still make the obvious of my work using expressionism and brush strokes or lines. With creating art, I want to make a narrative that is expressive and captivating with connections like each piece is part of an investigation. I want people to stare at the work until it all makes sense as a series and as an individual piece. Creating art is only another way to create a movie, a story, a narration of paint or charcoal or digital clutter.