ARTIST STATEMENT

I paint to create a place of recognition — where a stranger stands before the canvas and finds something they thought was only theirs. A memory surfacing. A state they never named. The quiet shock of this is me — and I am not alone in it. If my work does anything, I want it to do this: return people to themselves, and to each other.

My paintings are built for slow looking. Layered colour fields hold hidden figures, small characters, images inside images — the eye searches, wanders, discovers. I want the first encounter to be almost physical: an ecstasy of colour, a pull toward the surface. And then the second encounter — quieter, more personal — when the painting starts asking questions back.

The white line came to me by accident and stayed as a language. As a student I drew over my paintings in black ink — it was simply the cheapest. People began asking if I was depressed. I switched to white almost out of defiance, and discovered it was what I had been looking for: purity, silence, the facets of a cut diamond. Now the white linework is the nervous system of every painting — a map of stillness drawn over flowing colour, the trace of a meditative state I enter while working and hope to pass on.

Painting is the one place where I answer to no one. In film there is always a crew, in music a collaborator, a producer, a stage. On canvas every decision is mine — colour, composition, character, risk. The only limit is skill, and skill depends only on what I am willing to give. That total authorship is not control for its own sake. It is freedom — and I paint so that the person standing before the work can borrow some of it.

Since 2014 my practice has grown into one interconnected body of work — the Wanderer Universe: ten series tracing a small figure's search for truth across vast abstract spaces. It began with a tiny wanderer lost in cosmic terrain. It continues today in Inner Territories, where the figure has come closer — fragmented, multiplied, emerging from abstraction — no longer searching the universe, but mapping the territory within.