This work began with a single, quiet act: painting a flower. A timeless subject that has symbolized peace, beauty, and prosperity. But after it is repeated 180 times, its serenity becomes noise. Each bloom, once an emblem of stillness, now exists within a crowded grid, transformed like something of the digital age into something overstimulating and chaotic. The composition mirrors our collective condition of endless scrolling, information overload, and beauty consumed at speed. The flowers blur together like memories, like the thousands of nearly identical images we store on our phones. They represent the multitude of simultaneous lives unfolding, all asking their own versions of “why.” Why have we lost ourselves to the noise? Why don’t we listen to each other? Why don’t we love now? These questions move between the personal and the universal, between individual grief and societal paralysis. They speak to helplessness, empathy, and the quiet rage of witnessing the world’s pain while managing one’s own.

The grid becomes a metaphor for the digital world, a system that organizes chaos while perpetuating it. Beneath its symmetry is the tension between connection and alienation, presence and absence, beauty and despair. At its core, “Ataraxia” references the Greek philosophical ideal of inner tranquility, a calm mind unshaken by external turbulence. In the process of making the individual paintings, I am lost in the peace and Ataraxia, but it is fleeting and just a moment, before the inevitable weight of the world creeps back to the conscious. This work wrestles with the impossibility of serenity in an age defined by constant motion and exposure.

Through this piece, I ask: Can beauty still quiet us? Can repetition lead us to peace — or does it only remind us how far we’ve drifted? Each square is a moment of attempted stillness, a fragment of focus, a fleeting breath amid the storm. Together they form a meditation on fragility, healing, attention, and the longing for quiet in a world that rarely allows it.

Though I never know the scene my paintings tajke me to, so many resemble my travels. And others seem like a place I know but can't remember ever going to. Maybe they are in my memories from a book or a film. The rolling countryside hills could be my hometown or The Shire. The forests could be from a childhood fairytale or a hike last week. This specific series, with its dense forests, or open valleys gives me a sense of grounding and history. As if it is the hills of my ancestors. 

I refer to these pieces as Modern Romantic. Embracing my favorite part of the Romanticism movement, I aspire to experience and understand the world through emotion and feeling. My pieces are born from my subconscious, fusing my memory with my perception of an idealized scene. I start each painting with only a loose sense of a specific memory and a vision of where light will reflect. The rest transcends through many fine layers and compositional arrangements.

Though subtle, some pieces have emerged with hints of the many landscapes I have witnessed - ranging from my time living in Wyoming, Vermont, and Colorado to my travels in Southeast Asia, Australia, the Caribbean, and Europe to my home base in Maryland and summers spent in the Adirondack Mountains.

I purposely blur or ‘fog’ my paintings to force the viewer to perceive the scene as a whole. By eliminating tight detail, the eye is not distracted by ‘this or that'. The viewer is able to perceive the scene as a moment. My hope that such ambiguity enables each viewer to connect with the scene in his or her own way and pull from a personal memory- a place, a feeling, or a time.

In my Seascapes series, my mind tends to want to be calm and centered as I create them. Long horizontal brushstrokes lead me to a nautical scene that feels familiar and meditative. 

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Mountains can be a very demanding image. They are breathtaking and detailed and full of majesty, life, and danger. I like to present them as complementary to a scene. That they should have as much focus as the grasses, trees, or water before them is important. I love how the various earthly wonder all become one when presented out of focus or "blurred".

My works on paper have inspired an exciting process to create a setting for my images. I only prime a small rectangular area to paint on so that the surrounded unprimed and unpainted paper acts as a built-in frame mat. On some cases the edges are not completely perfect where the paint meets the unprimed paper, leaving a very subtle note to the rustic nature of art making set against the very clean and perfectly placed "rectangle of art". Though I fight the imperfections, I welcome them when they emerge. As in nature, you cannot control everything and it is impossible to authentically create such a beautiful imperfection.

My works inspired by Still Life painting is a reference to my traditional training and a nod to the rebellious process I now embrace. Without a reference, the details appear abstract and sometimes question the correct lighting and shape of the natural form. Like a memory, some parts are accurate and some embellished or pieced together in your mind to make sense of it. What comes at the end feels familiar and symbolic of the ever-classic subject of still life, but with a twist.