My work addresses the changing and overlapping ideas of what is deemed socially acceptable subject matter: beauty, sexuality, androgyny, fertility, and decay. I explore the way norms govern or else subvert these classifications and natural bodily processes, and how people interact based on restrictive models, rather than organic moments of connection and physical experience.

Most recently, I’ve drawn inspiration from traditional Renaissance composition and oil glazing techniques. With these classical references in mind, I depict thoroughly contemporary individuals and their shifting relationships and conceptions of themselves. The finished painting synthesizes canon and impulse, historicizing new ideals of beauty and sexuality.

By rejecting the restrictions that form destructive thought patterns and relationships (with our body and with others’ bodies) and visually elevating “vulgar” natural processes I encourage the viewer to embrace progression and new identifications, while engaging them in the aesthetic pleasure of the present tense.