I came to painting later in life, and almost immediately found myself struggling with a basic question: What did I actually want to paint?

I experimented with abstraction and tried a lot of things, but eventually realized I needed to stop worrying about what I thought art was supposed to be. I started with something simple: paint something that brings me joy. I went through my photographs and found images of family and friends sharing drinks, playing in the water, and simply enjoying one another. Those paintings felt different because they meant something to me.

Eventually, painting something that felt authentic became non-negotiable.

I began to realize I wasn't really painting people swimming, floating, diving, or leaping. I was painting moments of human experience—joy, freedom, belonging, strength, wonder, surrender, and the complicated emotions that come along with being human. That realization became an ongoing body of work I call The Shape of Human Experience.

There is a personal reason I'm drawn to those moments. I grew up gay in a strict, non-inclusive religious environment and learned early to suppress and compartmentalize an important part of myself. Looking at my work now, it makes perfect sense that I'm fascinated by figures that seem completely free, completely alive, or caught in a moment of release.

Lately, I've been pushing the work further. I'm experimenting with how much of a figure I can scrape away, obscure, fragment, or destroy while still leaving enough for the viewer to find. Water has always given me permission to mess with reality—distorting bodies, dissolving edges, and changing what we expect to see. Now I'm doing the same thing with the paintings themselves, allowing backgrounds to move into and through the figure and leaving more space for someone looking at the painting to bring something of their own experience into it.

My background in computer science and landscape architecture probably explains some of the structure underneath all this. But painting has increasingly become the place where I allow myself to let go of some of that structure.

I'm still very early in this journey, and that's exciting. I don't know exactly where this experimentation will take the physicality of my work next. What I do know is that I've only begun to explore the enormous range of emotional territory that comes with being human.