My art practice is based upon drawing and pattern-making as a way to investigate form and memory. Using gouache paint on paper, I create detailed layers to build other-worldly abstractions rooted in familiar organic shapes. Revisiting a painted surface many times over the course of weeks or months is essential to the development, resulting in images that are as much a tracing out of time as a representation of my imagined world.

Beginning with intricate marks, as seedlings or saplings, my work grows gradually, reflecting the very processes of nature the landscapes depict. Imagined shapes and impressions form a richer tapestry of many pathways that direct the viewer to wander among memory and reverie.

With an understanding that we are all part of the natural world and constantly becoming, I draw on disciplines both outside and within visual art culture, and work toward developing an organic and personal response to what a painting will eventually become. I’m inspired by botanical illustration and a variety of craft traditions as much as early modernist painting and the garden that physically surrounds my studio. I like to compare these paintings to objects built up from many threads or stitches, like a quilt or knitted surface. An appreciation of hand-rendered craft comes from the Pre-Colombian art traditions found in Latin-American and Southern Californian cultures exposed to me in my childhood in San Diego, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Hand-painted pottery and woven tapestries form an aesthetic that has inspired my obsession with colour, as well as an interest in using elements such as repetition, pattern, and flatness to make paintings that push into excess, overlap, and detail; in turn blossoming into something new.

I come to these paintings with a holistic daily practice that is as important to the work as the outcome. This interplay of work routine with the propagation of large scale visual patterns is a way to put motion in order and to lay out time onto its own surface. Passages emerge, tiny markings allowing for shifts toward the unknown.