I don't stage my subjects. Some come from real, unposed moments: family, friends, people caught without an audience in mind. Others exist only in my imagination, figures I build from nothing but still paint as if I know them. What ends up on the canvas is reassembled and interpreted, shaped by my hand until something true comes through.

I work in oils, with color and brushwork left visibly expressive rather than smoothed away. What I'm after is a true human moment, the feeling of it, the story it tells, whether that means catching someone once the performance has dropped, or a moment that was never performed to begin with. Painting is how I reach for it.

I was born in North Pole, Alaska, where long winters and a large family created space for solitude and observation. Art has always been how I've made sense of that space, drawing, making, noticing even as a girl. I carried that impulse through years of travel and into my home studio in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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My formal education came through earning a BA in Design and then running a successful branding business, where I learned the architecture of communication: color, form, typography, and how visual language shapes what people understand and feel. But I realized quickly that what I wanted wasn't to build communication for others. I wanted to build my own expression. Painting became the way to do that. It started as a practice of noticing: looking closely, failing often, looking again. And it still is. That rigor came from design. The instinct to look for what's real underneath came from painting itself.