Artist Statement

I’ve always admired art forms beyond painting. Theatre and dance, in particular, have a way of heightening emotion through movement, gesture, music, and atmosphere.

I was fortunate to attend a ballet event as a volunteer photographer, where I was given permission to photograph the dancers. Later, I combined several of those images to create the composition for Luna Piena.

I imagined the dancers moving through a backdrop that drifts out of reality and into a whimsical nocturnal forest. I was especially interested in the contrast between passages of carefully observed musculature and skin, and areas allowed to dissolve into abstraction.

I wanted the painting to hold that same tension I admire in dance: discipline and freedom, form and expression, technique and poetry.