The term poetry feels like it most closely describes the artmaking process for me. I love to think of painting as a kind of poetry without words. Painting speaks in line, color, shape, and layers of recorded action, it tells stories of the alchemy of control and release; of chance and will, of clarity and obfuscation. As I paint, I imagine that I am creating  poems and short stories using abstraction, repeating patterns and representations of familiar objects like quilts, animals and figures as my language.  

My earliest childhood was spent in rural Tennessee; raised on hippy values and Appalachian spirituals in a dirt floor cabin; I began my life-long mistrust in the delineation of inside (domestic) and outside (wild). Later, when my family moved to a tiny rural farming town in Vermont, I spent my time reading fairy tales and playing in the woods and tuning in to scratchy, Canadian radio to listen to punk rock. All of these things continue to form the vocabulary of my paintings.

For me, painting is an act of self-recognition; a dialog with my own skills and inadequacies. I express this through unmediated, quick brushwork. I trust the unknown to be wiser than I am, and I push against what I know with curiosity and excitement. I record all of this in my paintings, and in this way,  I am able to engage with my internal chaos, and make momentary peace with the universe. It is the dialogue between my nature and the nature of the materials, and my deep admiration and gratitude to artists throughout history that drives me to communicate this way.