My brain wants to draw a perfectly straight line, but my eyes are drawn to the irregularities of the “imperfect.” There’s an energy in the imperfect. I find it in nature, as well as in art.

Nature’s beauty is built on the chaos of irregular lines, odd shapes and juxtapositions, yet somehow, it all comes together to form an indelible sense of place. It’s one of the many things in the natural landscape that captivates me.

When I look at art, I see the shapes of the lines, marks and brush strokes. Viewed up close, they take on an abstract and often random quality; from a distance, the beauty of the whole is revealed.

Through my art, I explore this connection between energy, serenity and sense of place.

I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in printmaking, but what really stuck with me was a semester-long course focused on mark-making with pencil, pen, ink, charcoal, and other media. We made marks on paper day after day. At the time, I didn’t think much of it — truth be told, I found it a bit annoying — yet making marks has become an integral part of my creative process. For me, it’s a mix of happenstance and intention: quick energetic marks with an inherent chance of unpredictable results, followed by meticulous, intentional marks to hone the composition.

In the journey towards finding my own artistic expression, my art has evolved from working in small format (under 7×5″) with collage materials and their pre-existing characteristics, to creating mark-filled color fields (also small format), to my current work which does not involve collage at all: medium- and large-format black and white paintings in gouache on paper. Throughout these bodies of work, the presence of energetic marks is a fundamental characteristic.

For my boulder and stone wall series, I reference photos taken on walks or bike rides. Back in the studio, I do sketches in a variety of dry media to get to know the composition and draw out the emotion it evokes. From there, I map out the composition onto larger paper, grab my tools — palette knives, string, bamboo skewers, and a natural fiber whisk broom, to name a few — and begin to paint.

Reconciling the happenstance and intention in a painting is like a puzzle. Is a particular mark — one that may or may not have turned out quite as I’d expected when it landed on the paper — the one that unites unanticipated juxtaposition and interesting balance to complete the artwork? Sometimes I have to walk away for a bit and return with fresh eyes to make that determination. Often I’ll see things that I didn’t while laying the marks down on the paper. It’s all part of the creative exploration.