An abundance of untapped beauty can be found in the melancholic components of life. The tenacity and strength of humanity can be seen in our ability to face struggles and yet retain the drive to endure. I love to capture the emotional tenor of this resilience in my paintings. Sometimes it is best expressed through distorted portraiture that isolates a moment in thought, while other times an allegorical landscape depicts humanities flaws through its own anomalies.

Having always been interested in life experiences that connect us all, I found myself drawn to the way people think, cope, and dream. Recently I have been exploring the dreamscape as both a psychological expression and a biological reaction, full of enigmatic imagery that continues to confound and link humanity. Artists have been dealing with dream content for centuries, but as ideas of how dreams are formed and how they reflect or influence our lives continue to change, so must the artwork discussing it. The Surrealists, such a Leonora Carrington, looked to Freudian principles and included personal iconography in paintings, depicting dreams as a spiritual experience. More contemporary artists dealing with dreams, such a Margherita Manzelli, create paintings manifested from Jungian concepts of the persona or the archetype. Now, neuroscience theorists, such as J. Allan Hobson, add a biological twist to traditional dream interpretation, opening the door for a twist in dream depicting artwork.

Dreams may be a "programmed, neurally determined genesis," according to Hobson, created by the firing of neurons in the brain during REM. From those random flashes of nostalgic memories, the mind weaves a tale to connect these impressions in an otherwise undirected dream. In my paintings, I bring this process to life by depicting random elements from my own dreams in a vortical landscape of the mind. Just as the mind creates connections among random elements to form dreams, so must the colors, shapes, and personal connotation of the elements and their relationships to each other create new dreamscapes for each viewer. The lines between, memory and reality, constructions and truth are blurred in an alternate reality full of humor and turmoil, leaving the viewer to decide what is being portrayed and what is merely a figment of their imagination.