ARTIST STATEMENT
As an artist, I strive to establish an intimate relationship with my subject matters and seek to celebrate the very things that make us human – our emotions and ability to empathize. My work explores the vast complexity of human affective consciousness – the instinctive, yet multifaceted nature of organic emotions that one individual has for another, for one’s self, one’s family, culture, freedom, gain, and loss. My work is a reflection of my identity and experience, and having that personal connection with my creative process allows me to express my opinions and feelings unapologetically.
I think of my work as a conversation between myself and the subject being studied. Sometimes it is resolved. Sometimes it is open-ended. Most of the time, the work ends up taking a completely different turn from what I have envisioned pencil-sketching my idea on the blank canvas. I allow myself to make mistakes and the work to evolve, as my feeling and understanding for the subject matter develops. My works are, therefore, intimate narratives, and each painting is a representation of its own journey and discovery. In them, I employ a variety of color qualities, stylistic forms, depths, textures, and paint application techniques that I feel resonates with the individual narrative. By working strategically within painting’s many forms and varied past, I knit my contemporary concerns, personally and painterly, into the centuries-old conversation of figurative painting.
EXHIBITS
2019
New Voices, Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles
2018
Annual Students Art Show, CSULA Fine Arts Gallery, Los Angeles
2017
Ungovernable, The Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles
10000 Hours, CSULA Fine Arts Gallery, Los Angeles
Annual Student Art Show, CSULA Fine Arts Gallery, Los Angeles
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
My students will be taught, and constantly reminded, that art is subjective. That does not suggest subjectivity can always be used as an excuse; that means subjectivity will be explained, listened, considered, and constructively discussed. There is more room for understanding and improvement when we say, “I like/ don’t like it because,” instead of “because I like/don’t like it.”
My students will be taught it is okay to not feel strongly about art that everyone else feels strongly about. Contentment encourages consistency; dissatisfaction fosters an aspiration for change, which motivates research and experimentation, which, with the right tools and appropriate guidance, inevitably result in innovation.
My students will be taught that I am not the answer. I am the catalyst, not the solution. I am the provider of the means needed for their own discovery, and a space needed for their experiments and learning through trial-and-error. With each lesson and demonstration comes the potential to be taken further. Students will learn to take creative control over the direction of their learning, by building bridges that link new content and skills to their respective prior knowledge and beliefs, and sometimes questioning those knowledge and beliefs. They will be pushed out of their comfort zone to realize their potential and gain confidence in their ability, so that when faced with the endless possibility of the world, they are unafraid to take risks and believe in their own instincts and judgement.
My students will be taught that their only adversary is their previous work. The goal of education is not to be the best at something, but to be a better version of one’s self continually.
My students will be taught, informed, inspired, motivated, and impassioned by not only the course’s content but also by their peers, their observation, their own discoveries, and their new perspectives on the world around and within them. They might not be taught that education is reciprocal; that I will learn and grow with them through each assignment, through their success and failure, through the challenges I watch them overcome, and the challenges they make me overcome.