TRADE ALLEY ART GALLERY

I was born and have lived in North Carolina for most of my life, and am also shaped by experiences living in the American Southeast and Northeast, as well as Belgium, Thailand, and Wales. I started painting in the late 1990s and work primarily in acrylic paint today. I find inspiration from the continuous, unwieldy growth and renewal of nature. My home in Appalachia provides me with a daily lesson in beauty and resilience. Whether figurative or abstract, my paintings typically saturate the canvas in color distributed across hundreds or thousands of brushstrokes. The fast-drying acrylic medium offers me a near-continuous painting process for applying layers of color. I enjoy developing this process on larger scales, which allows me to express complex relationships between color, pattern, and movement. My goal is to express the joyous vitality I see in the natural world, which is also to recognize its frailty. Art is an expression of my hope and concern for our future. I hope that the energy in my paintings invites viewers to pause for aesthetic contemplation and to reflect on the positive inspirations in their own lives. Clementine the beagle is my studio manager."