I am a Brooklyn-based 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.

The way my mind works shapes the way I paint. My pull toward symmetry, circles, and grids was never simply aesthetic preference. It was my mind searching for order and resolution. Textured glass makes that impulse tangible, giving it structure, repetition, and pattern to move through. With practice and awareness, I've learned to shape a tendency that once shaped me. The negotiation is ongoing. Color, the degree of distortion, whether a shape reads as clear or obscured: some of these choices come from concept or instinct, some from a need for something to simply feel "just right," and just as many from the decision to challenge that need and leave something imperfect, unresolved, uncomfortable.

My current series, Friends & Family, turns the refractions technique on loved ones and sentimental objects, evoking a familiarity that is specific and obscure at once. Knowing my subjects changes how I work and brings a particular intimacy to the process. My relationship to each one shapes the piece from conception through completion, through color, vibrancy, and how much clarity or distortion I allow. There is something profound about painting someone you love through a lens of distortion.  It mirrors, in some ways, what I've learned about the way I see and think: fixating on something precious, filtering it through discomfort, and finding a way to let it exist, imperfectly, anyway.