About

I visualize feelings in my paintings through color and texture. They began as minimalist dog figures, a presence that holds them; now they also surface as the rhythms of nature, the present they move through.

I never fit in as a child, not knowing yet that I was both queer and hypersensitive. I only knew I cringed at my own feelings. Everything came to me as image before it came as language, so I could never say out loud what I felt. When my older sister bullied me until I cried, the adults laughed instead of stepping in. In my family, the soft one was the joke. I used to seem overly sentimental, overly sympathetic, sometimes overly happy. It was safer not to be seen, so I learned to look away. It is exhausting to be overwhelmed by emotion while letting none of it show.

In 2019, my dog Jupiter came into my life. We understood each other without language, and he saw me without the labels or judgments people carry. Whatever I was feeling, he stayed; nothing about me was too much for him. Through Jupiter, I felt seen and caught for the first time. My early paintings hold what I saw in him: his goofiness, his pure joy, cropped close and amplified. I paint these dogs in acrylic, at the size his joy actually felt to me.

Over time the dog figure became a character I could project myself into, a vessel for my own stories. A dog carries no gender or race to read, so the feeling arrives first. A feeling is the one thing that never needs translating. In English as a Second Language, these figures hold what it is to live in New York as an immigrant, in a second language. The work reads as figurative, but I build abstract textures in the negative space, where the flow of feeling has always been.

Jupiter taught me to notice what is flowing in each moment. In 2022, I became a mother. Raising my child, I am raising myself again: teaching him to recognize his feelings, I learn to recognize mine. Recognizing a feeling is not the same as being able to name it.

A brushstroke can reach where language cannot, and give the feeling a form. In Jungian thought, water is the oldest image of the unconscious. Water Studies moves in two parts: first Jupiter swimming in water that is never still; then the flow alone, as much sky as water, where color and texture in oil carry the feeling with no figure to hold on to. I paint water ripples, clouds, leaves in the wind. These rhythms are the feelings of life, felt rather than explained.

I want my paintings to be a room where the viewer's mind can breathe.