I am fascinated with spiritual connections. In the pecan series of paintings, my study is the transcendence of the metaphysical in my personal experiences, using nuts as a starting point. These paintings are not, however, about nuts. Although the nuts are beautiful and interesting enough to be the subject themselves, my purpose in painting them was to attempt to undesrtand the mystery of a potential life beyond what we currently know.

Little nuts, in particular pecans, contain personal meaning for me, but I scale up these objects to a confrontational size in order to increase interaction with them and to suggest greater content. As I am painting, I get absorbed in coloring these otherwise plain brown morsels because, as I grow to focus more on the paint itself as communication and less on the rendering of the subjects, I find a little paradise in the limitless palette that oil colors allow me to create. I am also attracted to oil as a medium because of its versatility, fluidity, and immediacy once applied to the support (canvas, in my case). Furthermore, I am intrigued by a divine process I find in my work. The creating, applying, layering, digging, scratching away, building up, ruining, restoring, concealing, and exposing offer the artist abilities and actions normally attributed to a greater, more metaphysical being. Essentially, I find promise in my work and myself as an individual because I am transforming raw, meaningless material (oil amd pigment) into an engaging image.

Most of my work presents a new perspective on familiar, secular objects. The objects always contain sentiment and spiritual meaning for me. Since the Fall of 2007, my paintings have focused on the subject of pecans and pecan pie as a prompt for my memories of both fear -- where allergic reactions have caused near death experiences -- and great pleasure -- where the nut nourished and surrounded me in my childhood. My goal is for these paintings to stimulate deeper thought about the idea of death and to challenge conventional understandings of the boundaries of our world and the world to come.