There is a particular joy in excess a sweetness in the superfluous that continues to draw me in. My paintings are rooted in the lush terrain of everyday abundance: inflatable flamingos, glossy cakes, bright plastic toys, and pets too strange or too specific to be practical. These are the artifacts of a culture that delights in the whimsical and the over-the-top, and I approach them with both reverence and mischief. For me, painting is a way of honoring the liveliness of the object-filled life, and of celebrating the sheer volume of images and experiences that crowd our waking and dreaming minds.
Raised in South Kent, Connecticut, and now living year-round in Provincetown, I carry a visual and emotional language shaped as much by rural quiet as by media saturation. My education first at Miss Porter’s School and later at Smith College, where I graduated Phi Beta Kappa with highest honors in studio art—gave me the tools to articulate this hybrid language of material culture and memory. The time I spent at the Vermont Studio Center and later at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown further deepened my practice, grounding it in a community where experimentation and play are taken seriously.
In my work, I gather and layer references culled from cartoons, social media, vintage toys, thrift store finds, and passing dreams. Each painting becomes a kind of personal archive at once familiar and eccentric, public and private. I’m interested in how disparate images and textures can accumulate into a coherent whole, and how color can be used not just as a compositional tool, but as an emotional one. Intensity, saturation, and contrast are as central to the paintings as their subjects. I want them to feel celebratory, overloaded, strange, and true.
The process is deeply intuitive, shaped by impulse as much as intention. Working in layers, I build surfaces that carry the residue of change additions, subtractions, abrupt shifts in direction. The result, I hope, is a visual exuberance that mirrors the complexity of contemporary life: fast-moving, object-rich, and always, somehow, worthy of wonder.
