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I made this page with some personal favorite paintings of mine. I’ll also add some description of my thoughts under the paintings as I list them.
Nokuru, 2017
I found a photo online of a Siberian tiger in front of a glass divider at a zoo, with children gawking at it behind the protected barrier. I decided to change the background to a person navigating a sea (or swamp) of dream-monsters. I have these periods where I become fixated on painting endangered species. There is something about the emotion elicited of looking at and trying to painting the details of an animal on the verge of collapse. It’s heartbreaking. It’s masochistic. And yes, it’s dramatic. But, it’s helpful for me. Additionally, I believe that in dreams, water is a symbol of the unconscious. You know, areas left untouched but are still impacting us. Sometimes we swim in them in our dreams. Sometimes we just look at the surface. So. Dreams + Tiger + Something? I’m not sure who is having the dream here, myself or the captive tiger. But I think that the uncertainty is the point. I guess that’s all I can say about this. I really liked painting this painting. A lot. The last thing I painted was the whiskers.
Human/Animal Conflict, 2018
This is related to the above painting titled Nokuru, in that both focus on big cats on the verge of extinction with some added layers. The big cat in this painting comes from a photo I found online of a leopard in a slum in Mumbai, India. That photo was in an article on how leopards, an endangered species with dwindling habitats, would traverse alleys at night trying to find food. This beautiful animal evolved to inhabit tropical rainforests now finds itself in a context where it slinks in alleyways. We’re all doing what we can. The image of the woman, smoking in the bathroom, fit I felt. I wanted to put them in the same area. But in addition to the woman and leopard I wanted a third focus: darkness. Before I painted this I had just finished reading House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. I can’t describe the book well. It’s weird, but so good. The book goes into great detail describing what it means to be enclosed in true darkness. They used the experience of being trapped in caves as living examples. If you’re on a cave tour and they shut the lights for a second… it wild! My first thought after reading this book is I wanted to paint darkness. Not darkness in the goth or dramatic sense, but maybe… hmm hard to describe.. but in the unconscious sense? Describing these is kind of hard! Why does everything need to be symbolic?? Just kidding.
Dawn Chorus, 2023
I don’t know any of these people. I found this photo on Reddit from a post of someone showing their parent partying in college. I saw it and it felt like a past home. Of being in my late teens and early 20s, of having this energy, of fluttering around and drinking and making stupid stupid mistakes and reading profound books and being so depressed because she doesn’t like you back or because that one person thinks you’re stupid or because you don’t know what to do with your life and this makes you a bad person. It’s a developmental stage. It’s a wild time. So, I decided to paint this stranger’s past life. I feel like I know each personality in this, you know? And that in this moment, there will never be a moment like this with them all together. That they each are going on their own path, and that they don’t know they’ve each already laid the foundations for these paths. The painting is named after a Thom Yorke song, because of course it is. A dawn chorus is the sound of the first birds in the morning, a sound I would sometimes hear going to bed after a night like this. A sound I really like to wake up to now. Because of, you know, aging.
I’m happy, hope you’re happy too, 2023
I like birds. It’s a thing. They are not mammals, but they don’t feel too far out on the branches on evolutionary tree of life as say, reptiles. They feel close to us, but still distant. I like to read about how humans have related to birds in our time here on earth. The obvious answer is spiritually. Birds are seen as conduits of the Gods. And in Christianity the dove comes after the flood, and the angels have bird wings, and the rooster crows after Peter denies Jesus the third time.
So. This painting is a combination of many things I was into at the time I was making it. The birds. The farm land. The shifting sky. And the image of a child murdering their abuser. I hope in your life, you are able to find space for needed transformation so the birds can transport you at the next stage of your life.
ED/SW, 2017
I worked in an ER (also called ED for Emergency Department) for a year as their social worker. It was a real meaningful year, I felt I was at the peak of my capacities as an acute care mental health professional before going back to academia to get my PhD. It was the first time where I felt like I was truly good at my job as a social worker. The ED is a sad place. But it’s also a workplace. While I had an office, the “office” was really these hallways. My day-to-day existence was walking these halways and going to rooms and meeting with folks in severe mental health crises. Day after day and hour after hour. Suicide attempt. Drug overdose. A five-year wants to die. An old man doesn’t know what to do because his wife is losing her mind. Too much.
One day, I remember walking down the hallway with a coworker talking about how much I loved to have soup for lunch, and we walked passed a guy hunched outside of a room (much like this painting). I remember this memory really vividly because it was then that I had the realization that I walked by shit like that everyday and did not really think twice because this is my “office”, you know? When you go to the ED because you attempted suicide, you are in the workplace of many people. These people want to care for you, don’t get me wrong, but they are also waiting for their shift to end, or to see what the soup of the day is in the cafeteria. I love soup and sandwich combos. So much. Somedays you would pause and see someone like this, a loved one outside of a room just with this 1000-mile stare. You wouldn’t be sure if they are having the worst day of their life, or if they are relieved. Most likely, it’s confusion and shock because everything has changed. So usually, when I’m walking down the hallway on the way to get my soup, for a split second I’d feel the pain, but I’d have to get rid of it because I am on a lunch break. And it’s soup/sandwich time.
It’s about perspective, I guess. The things we walk by… The feelings we feel and the feelings others feel. This was the first time I got real into this goopy way of painting, as well. I also accidentally left a piece of scotch tape in the painting.
This is my favorite painting.
Drunk, 2020
Death and the girl smoking are lifted from a sober meme page. The colorful painting above the two is a copy of A Young Girl Defending Herself against Eros by William Adolphe Bouguereau (1880). Bouguereau has this way of painting that is both realistic and cartoonish. His works are always SO colorful that you yearn for that color in your life but are not sure it is possible. For me, the days I see that much color are almost exhausting. I want to say this painting has to do with, well, drinking. That’s part of it. But that’s not completely true. I liked this painting a lot because I tried to capture a very specific feeling and to not think too much of it. So, say you’re at a party. And it’s exhausting, but in a fun way. You’re the best type of drunk and it’s loud and it’s social. So fun. But now you need a break. So you step outside and sit next to a stranger but there’s an instant connection. It’s instant, and brief, but it stays with you. Maybe the encounter opens up inner-doors and worlds, or maybe it’s just a fond memory. Or maybe something else!
Us, 2023
I painted this after finishing my dissertation at WashU and on the verge of getting my PhD and moving to my new job as a faculty member at a nice school. I was very excited. My research was on farmer mental health, and in this process I worked on a hog farm for a few day. And by “work” I mean barely work! I’m not trying to pretend to be something I’m not. But nonetheless. I spent a day rounding up 400 pound hogs and going to a questionable but large meat packing plant run by a corporation that feeds us all our food, and I watched some of the hogs die. It was disturbing. I also later installed water features for piglets. The circle of life.
It was rough. An unsettling experience. So I decided to paint the experience. I tried to paint each hog separately, instead of all at once. One hog a day. You know, to remember them..?
I’ll end here. I think this feels related to the Emergency Department painting. There are many jobs where you have to keep going. You know when working in a hospital that there must be a better system for caring for people. But instead of divorcing yourself completely from the system to make you feel better, you still go to work. But still “going” has its toll. I dunno. Hope this makes sense.
