My paintings are confessions.

I paint what I cannot say. Not because the words don't exist, but because they collapse under the weight of what they're trying to carry. Paint holds it differently; in layers, in texture, in the way a face can look directly back at you and refuse to flinch. These confessions began as a private reckoning and became something I could no longer keep private. They give me a vessel to carry the things I need to put somewhere outside myself.

Each work takes a feeling, a fear, or an internal truth that has resisted being spoken and gives it a body. The figures are close, uncomfortably close, because confession doesn't happen at a distance. It happens in the space where you can no longer look away. I am interested in what it costs to be seen, and what it costs not to be. Surveillance, performance, intimacy, shame: these are not abstract themes to me. They are the texture of daily life, and oil paint is the only medium I have found that can hold their full weight without simplifying them.

I came to this work through an unconventional path. I sketched at an early age, but studied film and photography. For many years of my life I left art despite how important it was to me. It was only through some of the worst moments of my life that I realize just how much I needed art to survive. What I found when I came back to paint was that I had so much that I needed to say. I make it visible and in doing so, to offer it to whoever needs to see it for themselves.