I make paintings to notice the world around me, understand myself better and connect with others. I am drawn to the flow and transparency of watery paint on absorbent surfaces. The process of observing and translating faces, figures, and flowers into paintings is therapeutic, meditative, and brings me joy. I enjoy the challenge of how to control it as much as the medium and surface will allow, while also embracing the unpredictability of it. This is an appropriate metaphor to my life right now—raising small children while trying to maintain a career and grow as an artist. My work functions to literalize the balance between control and release through its materiality and its subject matter.

When the pandemic began, while home bound, I surprisingly found solace in observing and painting flowers in watercolor as they took turns blooming. I have obsessively painted flowers each Spring since. I realized one reason it made me feel so good was the connection I felt to the women in my family who came before me, so I set out to explore the influence and connections to my maternal lineage. Working from the many flower studies, combined with sketches from old photos of myself, my mother, grandmothers and great grandmothers, I create large paintings on inherited old tablecloths to draw attention to undervalued domestic work. This most recent work examines the connections and differences between the lives my female forebearers and I have led, while reflecting broader social changes.