My family ancestry is in coastal Newfoundland. I grew up in various cities and eventually small towns on the shores of Lake Huron. I attended University for graphic design in Toronto. At the time I was painting portraiture and abstract expressionist scenes.

When I started taking art more seriously as a career, I did a self-directed residency in Newfoundland for three months. I pursued a new artistic path, painting from life in a beautiful and harsh landscape. Working this way asked me to develop my imagination and redefined my artistic process, which is still affecting my creative work and my view of creativity and intentionality in general.

With each series I work through specific challenges: how to represent movement, shape, mood by leaning into the universal. I research alternative ways of mark-making, pigment chemistry and I create through iteration. Bold colour and an intentional lack of hard edges allows the scene to buzz between representation and abstraction (just out of reach). I work with physical mediums but have extensive training in digital art. I rarely use photographic references and I never use AI.

My subjects are elemental in nature, oceans, trees, clouds. Close cropping of the subject was an unconscious choice, one that eliminates any elements of human interference. I found myself drawn to these subjects and their serenity to try and heal from past burnout and anger. I’ve come to see these works as a rejection of humanity’s obsession with celebrating itself, instead celebrating nature in its wildness. I try to capture their primal qualities, dense, lush and elegant. I’m exploring the visual language of nature through the intersection of plein-air observation and notan. The act of seeing is met with graphic design to reduce and rebuild scenes from their bare essentials. 

Education is important to me. I’ve worked as an art teacher and attended numerous workshops. I give back to the community through donations and organizing local exhibits.

Looking forward, I hope to develop a larger body of work with the input of curators.