I paint the people who stay with me
the ones shaped by land, time, and being together.

These aren’t just images.
They’re moments that don’t leave.

Sometimes someone will look at a painting and say,
“I think I recognize someone in this.”

I hear that more often than you might expect.

And I think that’s the point.

The figures I paint aren’t portraits of specific individuals.
They’re built from memory
from people I’ve known, places I’ve been,
and the quiet weight of shared experience.

I’m not trying to document a single moment.
I’m trying to hold onto a feeling.

A closeness.
A presence.
Something that feels lived in.

When someone sees themselves or someone they know in the work,
it tells me the painting is doing what it’s supposed to do.

It’s no longer just mine.

It belongs to a larger memory.

And maybe that’s what painting has always been for me 
a way of keeping something from leaving completely.

If something in the work feels familiar to you,
it may already have a place in your life.

I’ve always understood painting as a form of listening. To land, to memory, to people standing close or sitting quietly together. Long before I thought about exhibitions or statements, I was paying attention—to how light settles, how bodies relate, how place shapes who we become.

This space is an extension of the studio. A place to slow the work down enough to hear what it’s asking. Painting often happens in silence, but thinking doesn’t. Writing gives me another way to stay with the questions that surface while I work.

Much of what I paint comes from lived experience—growing up around land, labor, family, and shared space. The countryside, the farm, the woods, the gatherings that didn’t announce themselves but mattered deeply. These memories continue to inform how I approach figures, distance, and intimacy on the canvas.

I’m not writing here to explain the work away, or to arrive at conclusions. I’m writing to remain present with it. To trace the connections between land and kinship, between looking and belonging, between what is remembered and what is still unfolding.

This journal is simply a place to leave notes along the way.