Artist Statement

“Wild Side” is a collection of figurative paintings that I perceive as fictional beauty magazine covers. The series is a celebration of power, imagination, and human nature untamed, exploring contradictions at the heart of selfhood: beauty and unease, allure and alienation.

My work is an ongoing exercise in creating singular images of women that are highly expressive, character-driven, and iconic. At the center of “Wild Side” is a fascination with the expressive geography of the feminine face and figure, which I shape into entities of raw emotional energy. These women coexist with or are projecting wild animals and other forms, all of which inhabit white spacial voids—there is a deliberate absence of context, and I invite viewers to project their own narratives onto the painted figures. Through highly saturated color and stylization, I create playful melodramas, fictional character studies that glamorize and amplify liberated emotional realities. The paintings often provoke volatile responses, ranging from delight to discomfort.

I use AI to generate a library of reference materials and models for these works, which plays a vital role in my process, along with other technologies. AI serves as a lens through which I examine the interplay of personal and cultural symbolism. I work with a variety of tools to apply Flashe paint onto wood panels. My approach has a strong graphic quality, and emphasizes immediacy, presence, and the primal resonance of color and shape.

The love I have for art comes from 20th-century visual culture; caricature, movie posters, illustrations, advertisements. I see myself as a part of that cultural lineage, having kinship with artists who bridged commercial and fine art, such as Patrick Nagel, Andy Warhol, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.