My paintings explore the landscapes around my home and how my memories are inseparable from the natural elements I see around me. Recently, I have been working primarily in acrylic on 8×10 panels, allowing me to move quickly between scenes and respond flexibly to the changing weather and seasons. I believe these panels function like lyric poems, which are first-person impressions that capture mood rather than narratives. My panels serve as records of encounters with familiar environments and spaces around my childhood home in Anderson, South Carolina. Through these paintings, I am also seeking to restore a sense of focus that comes when being fully present in nature but is then broken up by being photographed on a phone. By recreating the images on a stationary, non-disruptive substrate I am restoring the feeling I initially had when I was fully immersed in the moment. My work and process revolve around revisiting the same places repeatedly to create a visual language rooted in presence, memory, and place.

Do not be afraid to paint landscapes. This subject matter should not be considered inferior to portraiture or more conceptual work. 

All of my time studying under Professor K. I have so many hilarious memories with him, but I think my favorite was when I was painting small details with a bit of reckless abandon, and he raised his hands in exasperation and said, "Where is the delicacy?!" He then painted the area himself. 

I think my favorite A+D class would be Painting 1. I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. Along with that I would say that one of my favorites would be Art History Survey 1.  

I think the most pivotal project I have worked on was in Painting 2 when I painted my first watercolor landscape. I got to choose what I did for this piece. When figuring it out, I told Professor K, "I want to paint something that feels like myself." This decision to paint a landscape from around my childhood home in Anderson catapulted me down the painting path I am on now.  

I plan on continuing to create work that centers around the landscape and our place in it. I want to create a private and professional painting practice. I also plan to work in marketing at a local chiropractic clinic in Anderson.

I hope that it causes individuals to contemplate the landscapes around them that they pass by everyday but probably do not consider. I hope that my work can provide documentation for the landscapes in Anderson that will one day change in the future. Many of the places I have painted in the last year have already been destroyed from urbanization, so I hope my work can serve as a visual record and language for what is being lost when rural America is disrupted by urbanization.