The Story Behind the Work

My paintings reflect the experiences that stay with us long after we've left a place behind.

The feeling of being moved by a place. Of standing before a landscape and sensing something shift. Time slows, the world grows more vivid, and what remains is wonder, connection, and a deeper awareness of what matters.

How I Work

Before I ever touch a canvas, I go to the place. I sit with it. I sketch, make small watercolor or gouache studies, let it move through me before I try to move through it. The sound of the water. The smell of the earth. The specific quality of light that will not happen again exactly like that, ever.

I take photographs on site, make field sketches, sometimes a small plein air painting. Back in the studio, I spread everything out and begin planning the canvas, combining different photographs and sketches together to find the composition that tells the story best. The final painting is rarely any single image. It is a conversation between all of them.

From there, every decision is in service of the feeling. Some areas of a painting are soft and blended, quiet passages that invite your eye to rest. Other areas have more expressive, impressionistic brushwork that creates movement and pulls your attention through the piece. A soft, foggy morning over a lake calls for subtle hues and broken color worked together gently. A quickly changing sunset over the Rockies calls for thick, expressive marks and a lot of energy on the surface. The techniques follow the story, not the other way around.

Throughout the process I keep asking the same question: what does this painting need most? How can I make you feel what I felt when I was there?

I consider myself an impressionist in my brushwork and a fauvist in my use of color. Which means color in my work does not describe what things look like. It describes what they feel like. What they sound like. What they do to your body when you stop and let them in.

When I am in the flow, I feel like my heart is opening into the piece. I forget everything outside that moment. There is just the paint, the light, the color, and whatever the painting is trying to become.

The Root

I grew up in the Ozark hills of northwest Arkansas, the kind of countryside where the nearest town had a population of four thousand and felt far away. We lived surrounded by forest and a bustling creek that I spent most of my childhood beside. Days outside, in the trees, beside the water. That creek is still in every painting I make.

One mile down a gravel road lived my great grandmother. She was one of the coolest people I have ever known. She had traveled. She kept stacks of National Geographics with photographs of places that felt impossibly far from Arkansas. She was herself an artist, and she kept an art kit at her house specifically for me.

Looking back, one of the greatest gifts she gave me was permission. Permission to be curious, to try things, to get things wrong, and to keep going. She had a remarkable way of making exploration feel safe. I could bring her my ideas, my uncertainties, and my endless stream of questions, and she would meet them all with generosity. She listened deeply, answered patiently, and reminded me, again and again, that exploration was part of the work. Because of that, I became a little braver and a little more trusting of my own voice.

I didn't realize it then, but she was teaching me something far beyond how to make art. She was teaching me how to be in relationship with the world. How to stay curious. How to remain open. How to notice beauty and allow it to change you. Years later, I can see how much of what she gave me continues to ripple outward through my own work. It shows up in my paintings, in my teaching, and in the spaces I create for others to explore their own creativity.

The Calling

Seven years of evening paintings

I spent seven years teaching art in public schools after earning my degree in Missouri. I loved the work. I loved the curiosity of children, their willingness to try, their capacity for wonder. There is something extraordinary about watching a person learn, especially when they surprise themselves.

It was also a season of life that asked for nearly everything I had to give. At the end of each day, I would return home tired but eager to paint.

Painting became the place where I could hear my own thoughts again. It was where I felt most like myself.

I painted through seasons of doubt and seasons of certainty. I painted when nothing seemed to be happening and when things began to open in small, unexpected ways. Over time, painting became the one place where everything else fell away. Time softened there. I could be fully present, fully myself, unburdened by what waited outside the moment. After seven years, I finally began to understand what that was asking of me.

The Morning Everything Changed

"The first morning of my first summer as a full-time artist, I sat in my studio with coffee and a life-sized calendar on the wall. I mapped out the year, then kept going. Five years. Ten. Fifteen. I wrote everything I could see for myself, without holding back and without filtering it through what seemed reasonable or practical."

The Leap

Ten years of backing myself

That was ten years ago. Some of those early dreams are now part of my daily life.

International art and yoga retreats have become part of my work. A children's book is slowly taking shape. I continue to show in juried festivals across Colorado. Alongside this, I create large-scale commissions for collectors who want their walls to hold meaning, and maintain a studio practice rooted in nature, light, and the sensory world of living things.

I live in Colorado now, and it still feels like a gift each morning. The mountains. The light. The particular clarity of the sky, which I am still learning how to translate into paint.

There have been many moments of doubt along the way. I kept going anyway. That feels like the most honest way to describe it.

Ten years of studios and festivals and work made in quiet persistence. Ten years of paintings that began without certainty, gradually becoming a life I recognize, through small, repeated decisions.

What I Believe

i. The natural world is doing something to us constantly

Regulating us, inspiring us, opening us. Most of us are just moving too fast to feel it. My paintings are an invitation to slow down long enough to receive what is already there.

ii. Color is not description. It is sensation.

My work is informed by both Impressionism and Fauvism, traditions that value sensation as much as observation. Color is not simply descriptive. It becomes a way of expressing atmosphere, memory, emotion, and presence.

iii. A painting on your wall can be a daily practice

A reminder of what it felt like to stand somewhere that left you without words but full of something. The right piece changes how you feel in a room, not because of how it looks, but because of what it carries.

iv. We should protect the places that protect us

The wild places I paint are not decorative subjects. They are living systems that regulate us, heal us, and remind us what we are part of.

v. Everyone has the capacity to create and expand

My great grandmother showed me that. The creative impulse does not need to be cultivated. It needs to be allowed. Given space. Given permission.

Colorado Inspirations

Colorado still feels like a gift every morning. I moved here five years ago, though my family has deep roots in this state and I had been visiting since childhood. What I did not expect was how completely it would rewire the way I see color.

The light here is different. The sky is different. The specific quality of an afternoon in the Rockies, the way alpenglow hits granite, the way a wildflower meadow at 11,000 feet holds every color at once, none of it prepared me for how much I would want to paint it. I am still not finished.

My Colorado work includes the Flatirons, Rocky Mountain National Park, Cameron's Pass, Mount Blue Sky, the high alpine meadows, and the aspen groves in October when everything goes gold. These paintings come from mornings I woke before dawn to drive up a mountain, afternoons I sat in a field with a sketchbook until the light changed, and evenings I stood somewhere that made me forget I was cold.

National Parks and Wild Places

Some of my most vivid paintings come from places that asked something of me before I could paint them. A long hike. An early alarm. A willingness to sit with a landscape until it stopped being scenery and started being felt.

I have found inspiration in Rocky Mountain National Park, Malibu Creek State Park, the Oregon coast, the lavender fields below Mount Hood, and the live oak canyons of California. Each place has its own color logic, its own emotional register, its own way of getting inside you if you give it enough time.

These are not paintings of places. They are paintings of what those places did to me.

Travel and the Wider World

My work has always followed my curiosity. Ireland, Peru, the American West, the California coast. I paint wherever light does something worth following, and I find that the further I travel, the more clearly I see what has always been true: nature is doing something to us constantly. Regulating us, opening us, reminding us what we are made of. Most of us are just moving too fast to feel it.

These paintings are an invitation to slow down long enough to receive what is already there.

The work is waiting to find its home

If something here resonates with you, I'm glad our paths crossed.

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