"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way -- things I had no words for." -- Georgia O'Keeffe

In my non-painting life, I am constantly crafting language to express ideas, thoughts, and feelings. Painting is for me a means of escaping the intermediary of words, to represent and access the immediacy of senses and emotions. I paint people, places, animals, and objects I care about, in order to understand them in new ways through the process of fixing them as color, shape, texture, light, and shadow in a particular moment in time. I never know exactly what the outcome will be; instead, through the actions of intense looking, and of scooping up the paint and setting color onto the canvas, I let the subject reveal what it is trying to say. In this way, I create a visual memory of my life and my surroundings, witnessing and recording for myself and others a child, a beloved pet, a neighborhood, before it changes, before it is gone. The writer Virginia Woolf argued in “A Sketch of the Past” that the best rememberer is a painter; I strive to put what I see and feel around me into paintings to create a record of memories for myself and for others.