Behind "Wish Fulfillment"

Wish Fulfillment, 14” h. x16” w., acrylic on canvas, 2024. part of the FERN DWELLERS series.

I heard somewhere that if you believe your wishes will come true it actually rewires your brain. It sounds sort of silly with Pollyanna-like thinking but I guess people have studied our thinking related to our mindset and experience. I don’t remember the source but I’ve heard it a few times. We also have like 80,000 thoughts in a day and most of them are negative fixations. This blows my mind to consider. How can one person even have that many thoughts? You don’t have to follow them all either.

The power of positive thinking over time even in small amounts causes synapses in your brain to actually physically change in the cells and makes it easier for good thoughts to bloom.

I’m intentionally choose to try and combat a few of those negative thoughts each day by imagining all my wishes have already come true and I am fulfilled. This is the secret to life I believe. When you realize that already have everything you desire and you control your own experience with the world you reclaim your own power and abundance.

This star form is a recurring motif in my work. Inspired by the special star shaped sand that can be only found on the beaches of Japan. Link in bio to see the collection of works with this form.

Check out the collection of art works with this same form or motif here. They all have different color palettes and compositions. And another piece I have created with the star sand motif here.

I also really like that Sonic Youth song of the same name. Don’t mind if I borrow it for this painting title at all.

About "Nightwatching"

Nightwatching, 16” x 20”, aersol, spraypaint, and colored pencil, 2021.

Night Watching is from the EXPEDITION SPECTRUM series. Each piece starts with a different base color from the rainbow. I was thinking about outdoor colors around midnight and the intense way they interact.

I enjoy looking at the night sky and imagining a multitude flora and fauna in a distant land.  These forms grow, bloom and change. Letting my imagination go wild and dream is my very favorite activity. The quiet space to dream in viewing the sky fuels my energy and curiosity about the world we live in.

Garage Mural - Trail of Fireflies: Hot Summer Nights

Trail of Fireflies: Summer Nights, 83” h x 190” w , spray paint and acrylic on metal, 2024.

Summer and winter seasons merge in this otherworldly landscape with shapes and patterns derived from the dance of the fireflies. The winter season is shown by painting trees without their leaves and summer is represented with green grass and firefly markings. Looking at sunsets is one of my favorite activities as they are colorful, ephemeral, and forever changing throughout different weather and cycles of nature. I used artistic license with the colors of the sunset behind the weaving lines of the river. Different species of fireflies create different marks when they glow and fly through the sky. Some make a dot, dash, squiggle, zig zag, or a even a j-shaped flash. It’s pretty rare to be able to see this many synchronous fireflies glow at one time. I have only experienced it though viewing time-lapse photography. The images and phenomena were so inspiring to me that I wanted to immortalize them in a painting. It gives me great joy to imagine their nightly flights. The firefly marks have become a recurring motif in my work and I have incorporated their glow in many paintings. I used Montana Gold spray paint for the background and Nova acrylic mural paint for fine details on the trees, pink flowers, and firefly marks. As typical in my work, the pink flower forms are not literal flowers but flower inspired. They could also be marine creatures, amoebas or something else. I try to evoke a hybrid of subjects in each of my artwork forms and invite the viewer to use their imagination.

See other artworks that incorporate my firefly motif here. The mural design was inspired by one of my smaller studio paintings shown on the firefly blog. That painting is in now in a private collection.

The project took about 36 hours including 6 hours of priming. I used an existing painting and slightly altered it for the initial design to fit the garage format. The smaller studio painting took around 3-4 months of full-time work spread out over 1-2 years time.

Please reach out to me about custom murals. I would love to collaborate with you.

Mural Process

"Release" in a collection

I love when people share photos of my work in their homes. It’s so fun to see where they live as I don’t often get to see. This artwork from 2007 found a home recently.

For the painting “Release” I was thinking of a release on several layers. I was thinking of it relating to what’s happening in the painting and also a state of mind when I created it. Like a flower releases a seed, or like a star turns into a supernova, or a coral releases a polyp, or a chrysalis releases a butterfly. These happenings all occur at different scales in nature. It shifts our perspective to being set free. “Release” symbolizes many layers of freedom from the micro to macro in our world. The 3D dimensional relief texture shapes create another physical release in the painting. My work at this time utilized a lot of low relief textures like modeling paste.

Artist Panel at Brushwood

Connecting to Our Common Ground - Artist Panel 

Brushwood Center's Connecting to Our Common Ground Art Exhibition was part of the 40th Annual Smith Nature Symposium Event Series. The 2023 Smith Nature Symposium theme, Connecting To Our Common Ground, was inspired by this year's Smith honoree Baratunde Thurston. In his PBS show, America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, Thurston travels the country to uncover our complex relationship with the outdoors. In this exhibition, we explored the ways that artists from different communities experience the natural world.

On September 10th the artists of this joint exhibition with Hyde Park Art Center gathered to discuss their work at Brushwood Center. Watch the full panel below to hear from the artists about their relationships to nature and the natural world, and this special exhibition!