_edited.jpg)
Current Events/Documentation
The Art of Coming Back
A podcast with Gurlish Gurus September 2026
Available where you listen and on Youtube
LA Art Documents:
Studio Systems Residency Torrance Art Museum
The short documentary focuses on the final three paintings from the residency — To Love Somebody, Staying Alive, and How Deep Is Your Love — which marked a significant shift in my practice. I began moving beyond the painted surface and into the viewer’s space, while introducing oil paint, oil sticks, and fabric into my mixed-media process.
The residency became an important turning point in the development of Architecture of Becoming, a body of work that began just before the residency and continues to evolve today.
Click the image to watch the film on YouTube.
The Making of Rupture
Rupture marks a turning point in my practice and the beginning of The Architecture of Becoming. Until this painting, I was exploring how emotional experience could be contained through gesture, layered materials, and structure — how we hold what we carry without needing to resolve it. With Rupture, that inquiry shifted toward how invisible internal experience might be given material presence through abstraction.
A period of loss helped open this new direction, prompting me to look beyond containment and toward the internal structures that shape us. Rather than organizing or resolving emotion, I became interested in giving form to what exists beneath language — memory, feeling, tension, connection, and experience.
I no longer see painting as a way to resolve experience, but as a way to make the invisible tangible. Through color, gesture, material, and space, The Architecture of Becoming explores the internal architecture of what it means to be human.
BIG things happening in the studio...
"Big things" are brewing in the studio as I continue to navigate the Hold/Held series and prepare for my residency at Torrance Art Museum this August.One thing I am noticing? How I cannot get away from myself, something some would refer to as "your voice or narrative" and they aren't kidding... it's real and I am loving every minute of it.Whole story in my newest Substack here
Photo cred: @margie_woods
Archived Events
The Studio System Experimental Residency project is a unique attempt to bridge the gap between artistic practice and the public. First held in 2015, Studio System seeks to bring the dynamism of the artist's studio into the museum space, encouraging audiences to not only see works as they are in progress but to interact with the artist to discuss inspirations, sources, thoughts, feelings, content and context, as well as chart the progression of the works over the month long period that the project encompasses.
August 1 - August 29, 2026
Closing reception Sat 29 August, 6-9pm
The Museum will be open to the public Tues-Sat, 11am-5pm
Please stop in!
PALOS VERDES ART CENTER
December 5, 2025 - January 3, 2026
Echoes and Emergence reflects where I am right now as an artist and a human. The echoes are my past, personal history, ancestral memory, the textures and fragments that shaped me. Some are heavy, some are beautiful, all of them present. I work with these echoes in the studio, layering paper, pigment, and marks that carry the weight of what’s been lived.
These works are about listening to the past without being bound by it, and trusting the messy, beautiful process of becoming.
5504 Crestridge Road
Rancho Palos Verdes, CA 90275
GALLERY HOURS
Mon - Fri, 9 - 5 pm; Sat, 10 - 4 pm
Studio Scenes
Selected studio documentation from the early research, practice, and preparation phase of HOLD / HELD.
I’m beginning a new body of work called “HOLD / HELD.” Before painting, I’m slowing down…researching, practicing, and learning what a surface can hold over time. This phase is about restraint, containment, and preparation rather than outcome. The paintings will come. For now, I’m letting the work take its time.
Starting HOLD/HELD with paint to canvas. This new work is structure forward and condition centered. The act of physically “containing” is part of the concept. Slower, gestures, a resistance to leave tension unresolved, a use of emotional rigor. It’s challenging to not reframe gesture as a method or release, but instead take that discharge and create compression as structure. The gesture becomes residue of experience, held in place without resolution. I’m asking, “What remains when memory is no longer something to be fixed, but something to be held?” “ How can gesture function as lived experience rather than expression alone?” Ultimately I’m investigating how experience is carried through time, held in place without resolution, repaired without closure and made present through gesture, material and structure.
The introduction of stitching marks a shift in the HOLD / HELD series from painted gesture to physical intervention. Rather than functioning as repair, the thread acts as deliberate inscription — puncturing the surface in the most unstable area of the composition. The act parallels tattooing: a conscious decision embedded into the body of the work. Subtle from the frontal view yet physically present in profile, the stitches introduce quiet autonomy within a field of descent.