My current paintings aim to recreate moments within my life where I pause and take in my existence as it is. In my past, I was always struggling with who I was and where I belonged. I never had a permanent space, moving around from place to place, nothing felt truly connected to me when I was growing up and because of this many mental issues arose. Over the past couple of years, I’ve slowly been able to better myself mentally, to build a mindful sense of self. I can connect to my environment now, feel and reflect on its existence. Oil painting along this journey has always stayed constant. It was always a way of working through the emotions of what was happening to me throughout the years. Digitally capturing and recreating these spaces help me re-live these states of time, to properly experience the environment, even if some come with difficult realities. Taking many photos during these pauses and having always tried to take my own references for my artwork impacted my process when these spaces started to carry more impactful energy within them, as I slowly grew into how I live now both physically and spiritually.

I started digitally editing my photos to enrapture the spaces and how I saw it. Using any digital device readily available I capture these spaces from my perspective. This allows me to enhance the image back to how it was seen from my perspective. I feel these atmospheres dissipate once its time has passed and point my focus into recreating its essence in my paintings. I hope to present these meaningful moments to the viewer. To pull the viewers own emotions forward from their own similar yet different day-to-day lives in which they may have paused and felt these same things.

Taking the time to realistically render these oil paintings allows me to reflect on what I was sensing, feeling, and understanding within each period of time. These captured still lives are raw, cluttered, and sometimes messy. Many may only see mondain objects such as bottles, trinkets, food, technology and more. All these little items of my life make their way into these artworks. In my work I represent this energy abstractly in semi planned expressionistic tendrils and whisps that flow through the composition. These energies are calming and direct the viewer through these renderings when they are visibly shown. The Lumosity hues and lights the spaces. These abstractions convey the movement of energy I saw while I was in these states. These come to life as I layer up thin and thick colors of oil paint. Starting by using a bright base wash helps create the general hue and feel of the piece as seen in “Altar Essance” where yellow is the dominant color underneath and on the sides. There is large swooping wisp of the same color moving through the objects of focus. These base colors can peak through the layers of paint as well to help create the desired effect. An example of this is in “Mindful Mornings” in which the greenish yellow shows through paint strokes on the edge of the windowsill. I hope these smaller details and larger abstractions resonate with the viewer and aid them in visualizing them within their own ways.