This series marks an arrival. The paintings gathered here were made in early 2026 in the weeks and months following the completion of my doctoral dissertation at The George Washington University — the culmination of nine years of immersive study, coursework, qualitative research, and sustained intellectual and emotional labor. Where my earlier projects explored painting and mixed-media processes across dissertation data, emotions around COVID-19, and other difficult histories, events, and topics—these works turn toward deeper, more positive feelings and embrace joy; the palette warms. The marks breathe differently.

Traces of Self, 2025-26, is a series of abstract acrylic paintings created over a year with my high school art and design students, working in small increments in our art and design classroom and using leftover paint that the students no longer wanted. During the painting process, while everyone was working, I actively engaged them and asked questions about my own work, seeking their critique and insights, just as I would with their work. In this way, I connected with my art students so they could see what I do as an abstract artist and use it as an entry point to discuss abstract expressionism and inner emotional life. This body of work continues my post-dissertation research into the intersections of psychoanalytic theory, art education, and aesthetic experience, considering painting as a symbolic practice for expressing inner emotional states. 

Dispersed Together, 2020-21, is a series of abstract mixed-media works created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These paintings explore this global crisis in various ways—how individuals were separated in their own communities, police brutality in America, widespread grief and loss, and more. Through layers of paint, graphite, and collaged drawings, each work captures the disorientation and the profound emotional impact of that period. Fragmented structures dissolve into gestures, emotional atmospheres, unfinished and distorted human figures, and traces of inner feelings—evoking the blurred boundaries between safety and exposure, the private and the public, and the body and its environment. The series explores how aesthetic experience serves as a form of emotional processing, based on my subjective experience of the pandemic.

Psychic Architectures, 2016-17, explores the deep subjectivity and interiority of self, mental health, and environment. I view my artworks in this series, and most of the artwork I make, as autobiographical documents of my own self-experience, representing varying emotional states. In Psychic Architectures, I paired various emotions with fragmented dreamlike urban landscapes, roughly based on Catonsville, MD, and Baltimore City. Red Plateau (2016) is a mixed-media painting that combines house paint, acrylic, and fragments of digitally collaged drawings. The piece reflects my challenges with anxiety—how it can fragment experience into varying emotional zones, each sealed within its own perimeter. The plateau becomes a metaphor for an anxiety state: a vast surface where movement feels suspended, and unease lingers.

Teaching as a Design Process, 2014-15, comprises mixed-media work in response to various assessment processes in art education. The works Tracking, Tracking Assessment, Levels, and Preserving, along with four other paintings (not pictured in this project sample), were part of the art exhibit "Demo Studio, Teaching as a Design Process" at D Center, Baltimore, MD, in 2014. The exhibit was documented in the article "Assessing Assessment: Art-Teaching Should Also Be Art-Making," by Terence Hannum, in Bmore Art, on September 15th, 2014. This project was part of an assessment research study group of in-state and out-of-state professional art educators and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) professors, and it spanned a year of work in 2014, creating and responding visually to various assessment models for teaching visual arts in the K-12 setting.