I’d rather not be indoors while painting, so usually I paint scenarios I long for. Over the past several years, I have embarked on three bicycle tours exploring 4,000 miles of American desert and coastline, seeking time away from the spectacle of society as well as learning to be quiet in nature. In presenting these distinctly North American landscapes and playscapes, I imagine distant human pasts as well as potentially distant futures.

Meditation before starting to work is imperative for me. It helps ground me in the present, attuning me to the immediate task of drawing and painting. My process begins in drawing and culminates in painting. Having a varied practice is fundamental. Currently my work involves figuration, abstraction, landscape, humor, friendship, science fiction, soccer, Greek history, and anthropomorphism.

My recent paintings are concerned with geometric abstraction, decoration, repetition, and their intersection with representations of nature and natural forms. They contain collisions of color, pattern, and form that move over and against themselves. These cut-canvas, layered paintings are textured with inlaid symbols, with multiple layers of surface coming together to simultaneously form and disrupt the image. The work explores utopian ideals of beauty and structure converging with the chaos of chance and process.

In a nod to the French postimpressionist painter Georges Seurat, who devised a painting method in which imagery emerged from thousands of colored dots, I have created a series of intimate, detailed, pointillist-style paintings in which I rely on repetition and attention to detail to make fields of flashes, stars, and light. My influences range from astronomy to particle physics; my paintings shift and oscillate between the macro and the micro, between the illusion of light and the visual disruption the images produce when viewed at close range. These works embody a

Color spotting is a passion of mine. Always in pursuit of a “color story,” or the ways color can identify a habitat or encode a culture, I create chromatic equivalents for both physical and numinous occurrences. I gather color clues and create hybridized indigenous palettes that are translated into paintings, drawings, photographs, and site-specific installations. I am influenced by everything, and my work, in turn, is a restructuring of this evershifting vantage point. Color functions as both subject and object in my artwork, and it is steeped in a process of analysis and

In this digital age of slick screens and quick images, I create physical images that promote slow viewing experiences and intimate, tactile engagements. I am interested in the idea of slow seeing. I am particularly interested in how efforts to slow and carefully examine the physical world can connect humans to their surroundings with empathy and compassion.

I make paintings that foreground an experience of the senses, in which moments of adventure and wonder are privileged over other moments. My work appears at first to function like dense and colorful abstract painting, but it contains representations of nameable things and recognizable spaces. Many of the marks or gestures applied to the surface are amended in some way: elaborated on, bedazzled, or made illusionistic. As I paint, I’m looking for the identity of these structures to fluctuate, as they become temporary guides or markers for traveling through the picture.

I use paint to build joyously compromised structures that merge the dualities of the natural/artificial and the personal/public. My vision follows my experience of the world. I am inspired by the use of color and patterns that instill desire and connection for the individual and society. I farm for my abstractions, from the patterns used in advertising and the packaging of foods people crave—like candy and snack foods—to the patterns that flow across the details of our everyday experience, like signs, floor tiles, scaffolding, and flowers. Their intricate surfaces recall

As I work, I don’t contemplate a painting’s end result, but instead move forward mark by mark, layer on layer, considering each action individually. These maneuvers can be altered or masked, but never erased. The compositions rely on my intuition, to the extent that I’m appraising the color, shape, and texture of each stroke, desiring to establish meaningful relationships among them. These are paintings assembled piece by piece and revealed to me incrementally. To the viewer, they come all at once.