There is something tender about the temporal in Sara Berkeley’s poem Bird Room that I immediately felt a kinship with. I like to think this essence operates in my work. When making paintings, I seem to operate simultaneously on two levels: responding on a sensorial level while working to make it succeed on a formal level.

I’m naturally predisposed to respond the world emotionally. It’s what I draw from to make my first mark on the canvas. There is always some degree of pleasure in the struggle that comes with painting to make perfect sense and yet resist logic. My environment, the cyclical connections with my garden, emotional reflections, memories, and the passage of time creates openings for experiences to enter paintings. Struggle is always there, of course, working its way into the process of discovering how to make the work both be and feel. It’s the one constant.