I am an oil painter whose work is rooted in close observation of animals, landscape, and the relationships that connect living things to their environments. I make representational paintings using saturated color, layered glazing, and wet-into-wet passages to create images that feel luminous and present. Light is central to my work: sunlight moving through leaves, reflected color, and the luminosity of stained glass have all shaped the way I build a painting.

My relationship to landscape comes from two rural places. I was born in Kentucky, where my mother’s family has lived for generations, and I am also a dual citizen of Costa Rica, where my father’s family is from the southern region of the country. Both places formed my understanding of the natural world. Kentucky gave me creeks, farmland, and the dramatic change of seasons. Costa Rica gave me dense tropical growth, extraordinary biodiversity, saturated light, and the rhythms of rural life in another climate. Both are places I grew up, and both are part of the visual vocabulary through which I understand the world.

Much of my recent work has focused on tropical animals. I am interested in painting animals as living subjects embedded within complicated ecological and emotional relationships. Fear, tenderness, dependence, competition, and care move through these paintings. By working at a large scale and attending closely to gesture, light, and environment, I try to give these subjects a presence that rewards sustained looking.

My practice is grounded in traditional oil-painting methods developed through formal studio training and more than a decade of painting. I use those methods to make contemporary images shaped by the landscapes and visual traditions that formed me. Across the work, I am interested in attention: what happens when a subject is looked at long enough, and carefully enough, to become more complex than our first impression of it.