I was raised in a small Mennonite community in rural Pennsylvania. My figure paintings feature animals, plants, and female subjects enmeshed in a knot of competing desires that fight to be the focal point. My painting practice pits the conservative values of the Pennsylvania Dutch against contemporary ideals of desire and faith through the female experience. These contradictory ideas exist in a space plagued by isolation and Appalachian fatalism: You work, you toil, you die.

My goal is to show an overwhelming energy that disrupts this fatalism. I use neon underpainting to illustrate the pulsing of a haunting spirit beneath the picture plane’s realism. Christian mysticism weaves throughout, and rather than a literal depiction of religious figures, the bodies become a call to direct contact with the spirit. The figures create compositions that mediate a desperation to close the space between suffering in this world and escaping to the next. I hope to compress the pastoral and instead, feature a close look into the psyche of dangerous emotions hiding beneath the surface.