My work begins in the body-its felt sense, memory, its resilience, its humor, and its failings. I paint from raw instinct, often before I fully understand what I am trying to say. Working with India ink, watercolor, acrylic, text, found objects, and reclaimed materials, I build layered surfaces that move between abstraction and recognition. I am drawn to what is raw, imperfect, unfinished, and honest — animals, ordinary objects, fragments of language, gestures, humor and the tension that exists between what is and what is felt.

As a breast cancer survivor and living with Rheumatoid Arthritis, my relationship with the body has become one of grief, adaptation, anger, surrender, and deep curiosity. Surgeries, loss, pain, and the ongoing unpredictability of illness have reshaped not only my body, but the way I see beauty, strength, and vulnerability. My painting often hold that same contradiction - tender and fierce, playful and unsettled, imperfect and deeply thriving.

Raised in rural Kansas shaped by years in Fort Worth, and now living on Bainbridge Island, my work carries the contradictions of my own life - faith, and doubt, tenderness and irreverence, same-sex love and Christianity, illness and healing, belonging and not belonging— Midwest grit, and the ongoing work of not censoring myself but becoming fully myself. As both a musician and visual artist, I paint much like I write songs-listening for rhythm, trusting my voice, and allowing the things to emerge in the pauses.

I am interested in the sacred hidden inside ordinary life - in a bird, a horse, a cat staring into a television, or people gathered around a table trying to understand one another. I want my work to invite the viewers into something deeper than image. I want to hold tension, humor, discomfort, and grace all at once. Painting for me is not about making something beautiful. It is about telling the truth.