After living in the Bronx, serving on mission, and encountering so much suffering amidst my own heart and those I encounter, My art ponders the age old question: “How is there beauty in suffering?” My paintings in this specific body of work are an exploration of this question of faith: amidst so much poverty, mental health concerns, educational deficit, and brokenness in our lives, where lies hope?

Through exploring tension, layering, light, and human experiences, I consider my art a quest to come face to face with resurrected beauty beneath the surface. Joy amidst sorrow, hope amidst despair, light amidst darkness, peace amidst chaos: all tensions that, at first glance, seem contradictory.

This style of contemporary realism connects Caravaggio’s dramatic lighting art with Millet’s everyday realism, merging the sacred amidst each ordinary moment, and proposing the Cross as a point of culmination in which each layer, each experience, can live simultaneously.