I create paintings that explore emotional landscapes and the natural world as deeply interconnected systems. Using realism and dreamlike imagery, I construct imagined scenes that function as symbolic self-portraits shaped by cultural duality and a sense of belonging that exists between languages, places, and ways of seeing. Growing up between English and Spanish made me aware of how often emotion exceeds language. Painting has become the space where those experiences can exist fully.

I use self-portraiture to examine my interior life, sometimes depicting myself directly and other times turning to animals or landscape as stand-ins when emotion feels instinctual or difficult to articulate. These shifts allow inner states to take form beyond the human figure and create distance from which I can see myself more clearly. The scenes I paint are guided by a personal cosmology: earth as safety, water as isolation, fire as fear, and air as expansion and connection. Through these elements, emotional states become physical environments.

This symbolic language developed through long hours spent alone in nature and a childhood shaped by faith and environmental values. I was taught to care for all creatures, an ethic reinforced through formative moments such as watching my grandfather rescue poisonous spiders rather than kill them. These early lessons, combined with an intuitive response to the natural world, formed a visual vocabulary in which animals and landscapes carry emotional and personal meaning.

I work in oil through a slow, layered process. I begin drawings with photographic references, and allow intuition to guide the painting once paint touches the surface. I work wet into wet until the whole image is nearly finished, and then I return with translucent glazes to build depth, contrast, and saturated color. Meaning emerges gradually. Each layer becomes a way of uncovering what the image is trying to say.

Through these imagined environments, I invite viewers to slow down and recognize their place within a shared ecosystem that is physical, emotional, and spiritual, where inner life and the natural world are inseparable.