Art is like therapy to me. It’s about revealing yourself and making relationships with the viewer. My purpose is to express myself in color and shapes, and to garner a response from the viewer. Sometimes I paint simply to make an image, or design something beautiful for it’s own sake. It’s the exercising of power over my sense of color, compositon and the medium I use.

In the sketching stage of a piece, my goal is to deconstruct familiar images into simplistic shapes. How the shapes interact with each other, perhaps combining and forming new shapes, or enhancing a single shape, is where color has an incredible impact. Each color is chosen because of how it plays with the others, whether submissively, harmoniously, or dominantly.

Some of my work (Encircled series) use mediums that don't always physically mix well together, like acrylic and pastels. But when these opposites are manipulated to work together, the result is an active, energetic visual. In my mind this process of a melting pot of mediums parallels the human condition – ethnicity, culture, spiritual beliefs all blending together to make a beautiful, and sometimes volatile, society.