I am a Brooklyn-based acrylic painter drawn to both realism and abstraction, and to the charged space where those two impulses collide.

My Refractions works explores the movement, texture, and luminosity of light as it passes through and reflects off textured and translucent surfaces. I begin by photographing compositions of colored lights and textured glass, capturing moments that are both real and fleeting. Though my work is technically realism, the way I render shapes and movement creates a feeling of obscurity and unfamiliarity, the beautiful strangeness of an ordinary subject caught in an extraordinary circumstance.

My lived experience with OCD shows up in my art. My tendency toward symmetry, circles, and grids was never purely aesthetic preference; rather, it was my mind finding order and resolution. Using textured glass as a tool for structure, repetition, and pattern is that impulse made tangible. With practice and awareness, I've chosen to take this previously uncontrollable tendency and mould it. My practice is still a constant negotiation. My choice of color, the degree of distortion, the clarity or obscurity of a shape: sometimes these emerge from concept, instinct, artistic choice, from a need for something to simply feel 'just right,' and often from the decision to challenge that feeling and leave something imperfect or uncomfortable.

My current series, Friends & Family, uses loved ones and sentimental objects as subject matter, applying the refractions technique to evoke an obscure yet specific sense of familiarity. Knowing my subjects changes how I work and creates a particular intimacy in the process. My relationship to each subject shapes the conception and evolution of every piece, through color, vibrancy, and the degree of clarity or distortion I choose. There is something profound about painting someone you love through a lens of distortion. It mirrors, in some ways, my experience learning about and managing my OCD: fixating on something precious, filtering it through discomfort, and finding a way to let it exist, imperfectly, anyway.