This collection explores the tension between control and instinct, realism and abstraction, as a reflection of personal transition and place. Created during a period of creative uncertainty after graduate school, the work embraces chaos, inconsistency, and emotional movement rather than resolution. By blending abstract mark-making with recognizable Louisiana imagery such as wildlife, architecture, water, and land, the paintings mirror both the restless interior of the artist and the unruly, layered nature of Louisiana itself. The realistic elements act as anchors of identity and home, while abstraction disrupts structure to make space for emotion, memory, and growth. This body of work rejects polish in favor of honesty, documenting a season of change where tradition and experimentation coexist, and where creativity becomes a means of grounding, transformation, and self-definition.
"The Waiting"
11 x 14 inches, 2025 Mixed Media on Canvas This work revisits the blue heron as a figure of quiet authority and inward focus, set against a heated, unsettled atmosphere. The bird’s form is rendered with precision and restraint, its deep blue body and sharp profile cutting through a ground saturated with warm oranges, golds, and fractured textures. This contrast heightens the tension between composure and intensity, suggesting a presence that remains deliberate even as the surrounding environment feels charged and unstable. The layered surface, dotted marks, and metallic disruptions function as visual noise, referencing emotional pressure, memory, and moments of abrasion rather than calm continuity. Against this backdrop, the heron does not retreat or dissolve. It holds its posture, embodying endurance and self-awareness. By placing a familiar Louisiana bird within a field of heat, friction, and abstraction, the painting reflects the experience of maintaining identity during periods of strain and transition. The work asserts that strength can be measured not by resistance or escape, but by the ability to remain intact and attentive while navigating intensity and change. |
"The Waiting"
11 x 14 inches, 2025 Mixed Media on Canvas This work presents the pelican as a symbol of endurance, responsibility, and collective identity, positioned within a layered and unsettled environment. The bird’s form is recognizable and deliberate, standing with quiet authority amid fractured shapes, dotted textures, and metallic fields that disrupt the surrounding space. The abstract planes and patterned marks suggest water, movement, and pressure, creating a sense of instability that contrasts with the pelican’s steady presence. The use of gold and saturated blues evokes value, sacrifice, and history, referencing the pelican’s deep cultural significance in Louisiana as a symbol of care and survival. Rather than portraying the bird in flight or action, the painting emphasizes pause and awareness. The pelican becomes a figure that absorbs its surroundings rather than reacting to them. This stillness reads as strength, not passivity. By placing a deeply rooted Louisiana symbol within a fractured, abstract landscape, the work reflects the experience of holding responsibility and identity through periods of change. It suggests that resilience is not loud or dramatic, but carried through presence, adaptability, and the willingness to remain grounded even when the environment feels unsettled. |
"Golden Hour"
16 x 20 inches, 2025
Mixed Media on Canvas
This work examines the idea of home as both structure and memory, using a familiar Southern house as an anchor within a charged, shifting environment. The architecture is rendered with clarity and order. Symmetry, columns, and fencing suggest tradition, stability, and inherited identity. In contrast, the surrounding landscape and sky dissolve into layered color, texture, and pattern, signaling emotional movement, time, and lived experience pressing in from all sides.
The house stands firm but not untouched. It exists within an atmosphere shaped by change, nostalgia, and reinterpretation rather than certainty. Trees frame the structure like witnesses, rooted yet organic, reinforcing the tension between permanence and growth. By placing a recognizable Louisiana home within an expressive, unsettled field, the work reflects how place can feel both grounding and complicated during periods of transition. The painting asserts that home is not static. It is something remembered, questioned, and redefined over time, holding history while absorbing the weight of personal change.
16 x 20 inches, 2025
Mixed Media on Canvas
This work examines the idea of home as both structure and memory, using a familiar Southern house as an anchor within a charged, shifting environment. The architecture is rendered with clarity and order. Symmetry, columns, and fencing suggest tradition, stability, and inherited identity. In contrast, the surrounding landscape and sky dissolve into layered color, texture, and pattern, signaling emotional movement, time, and lived experience pressing in from all sides.
The house stands firm but not untouched. It exists within an atmosphere shaped by change, nostalgia, and reinterpretation rather than certainty. Trees frame the structure like witnesses, rooted yet organic, reinforcing the tension between permanence and growth. By placing a recognizable Louisiana home within an expressive, unsettled field, the work reflects how place can feel both grounding and complicated during periods of transition. The painting asserts that home is not static. It is something remembered, questioned, and redefined over time, holding history while absorbing the weight of personal change.
"Quiet Watch"
5 x 5 inches, 2025 Mixed Media on Canvas This work presents the roseate spoonbill as a symbol of visibility, vulnerability, and belonging within a softened yet unsettled environment. The bird’s form is simplified and luminous, rendered in warm pinks and coral tones that contrast gently against a cool blue ground. This color tension mirrors the balance between standing out and blending in, a quiet negotiation between individuality and environment. The surface remains active with layered marks, subtle textures, and scattered interruptions, suggesting movement beneath an otherwise calm atmosphere. Unlike imagery that emphasizes force or dominance, the spoonbill here occupies space with openness and ease. Its posture feels present rather than defensive, grounded rather than fixed. The surrounding abstractions reference water, air, and emotional residue, creating a setting that feels fluid and transitional rather than stable. By placing a distinctly recognizable Louisiana bird within this shifting field, the work speaks to the experience of being seen during moments of personal change. The painting asserts that softness is not weakness, that presence can be gentle, and that identity can remain vivid even while navigating uncertainty. |
"Still Blooming"
5 x 5 inches, 2025 Mixed Media on Canvas This work centers on the magnolia as a symbol of endurance, memory, and quiet resilience within a shifting emotional landscape. The flower emerges through heavy texture and layered color, its white petals built thickly and imperfectly, carrying both weight and softness at once. Surrounding hues of green, blue, and pink suggest growth, water, and atmosphere, while metallic gold fragments interrupt the surface as traces of history, value, and lived experience. The magnolia’s form remains recognizable despite the distortion of material and ground, reflecting how identity persists through change. Rather than presenting the flower as delicate or pristine, the painting emphasizes its strength, density, and presence. The textured surface resists smooth resolution, mirroring the complexity of memory and the way place and emotion accumulate over time. By rendering a deeply Southern symbol within an unstable, tactile field, the work speaks to rootedness amid transition, asserting that stability is not the absence of disruption, but the ability to remain present and whole within it. |
"Between the Shards"
5 x 5 inches, 2025 Mixed Media on Canvas This work centers on the blue heron as a symbol of stillness, endurance, and selfhood within an unstable emotional and environmental field. The bird is rendered with clarity and intention, standing upright and alert, while the surrounding space fractures into layered color, texture, and embedded materials. Blues and purples suggest water, depth, and introspection, while warmer earth tones interrupt the surface, creating tension between calm and disruption. The crystalline elements embedded throughout the painting function as moments of pressure and weight, marking places where the surface has been broken, altered, or held in place. By isolating a familiar Louisiana bird within a restless, tactile environment, the work reflects the experience of remaining grounded while navigating internal noise and external change. The heron does not move or flee; it observes. This stillness becomes an act of resilience rather than passivity. The contrast between the bird’s controlled form and the surrounding abstraction mirrors the balance between instinct and restraint, emotion and composure. The painting asserts that strength can exist quietly, that identity can remain intact even when the world around it feels fractured, and that growth often happens not through motion, but through holding one’s place amid uncertainty. |
"Still Stands"
8 x 10 inches, 2025 Mixed Media on Canvas This work examines the balance between tradition and disruption through a familiar Louisiana symbol rendered in an unsettled environment. The fleur-de-lis, a form rooted in Southern identity, history, and architecture, stands as a grounded central figure, while textured surfaces, fractured color fields, and metallic interruptions destabilize its surroundings. The turquoise ground suggests water, atmosphere, and place, while gold accents operate as both reverence and rupture, signaling memory, value, and emotional residue rather than ornament. By isolating a recognizable emblem within a restless, tactile field, the painting reflects a moment of personal and cultural tension, where identity remains intact but is actively reshaped by change. This image asserts that tradition does not disappear in periods of transition; it endures by absorbing chaos, carrying both weight and movement as it evolves. |
"Where they Gather"
8 x 10 inches, 2025 Mixed Media on Canvas This work uses the imagery of love bugs as a metaphor for persistence, intimacy, and the unavoidable presence of life within a saturated, restless environment. Repeated forms scatter across the surface, suggesting movement, swarming, and collective behavior rather than a single focal point. The dense green ground evokes Louisiana’s landscape, growth, and humidity, while metallic gold passages interrupt the field as moments of memory, heat, and emotional residue. Texture accumulates unevenly, creating a sense of noise and pressure, mirroring how love bugs appear suddenly, multiply rapidly, and occupy space without apology. By choosing a creature often dismissed as nuisance or background, the painting reframes the ordinary as meaningful. The love bugs become symbols of attachment, survival, and coexistence, operating instinctively and in pairs, embedded within an environment that is both fertile and overwhelming. This image reflects a state of mental and emotional saturation, where repetition becomes rhythm and chaos becomes pattern. The work asserts that beauty and significance exist even in what is excessive, inconvenient, or misunderstood, and that life in Louisiana, like the love bugs themselves, is inseparable from abundance, movement, and intensity. |
"Quiet Bloom"
11 x 14 inches, 2025 Mixed Media on Canvas This work centers on the Louisiana iris as a symbol of resilience, renewal, and quiet perseverance. The clustered blooms rise upward with intention, their deep purple forms emerging from layered greens that suggest growth rooted in unseen systems beneath the surface. The background shifts between warm and cool tones, creating an atmosphere that feels transitional rather than fixed, echoing cycles of change, tension, and release. Unlike compositions driven by disruption or fragmentation, this piece emphasizes cohesion and upward movement. The irises stand together, neither isolated nor ornamental, asserting presence through collective strength. Their posture suggests endurance shaped by environment rather than resistance to it. By placing a native Louisiana flower against an emotionally charged but open field, the work reflects the ability to grow through uncertainty without losing form or purpose. The painting asserts that resilience can be graceful, that stability can emerge from fluctuation, and that growth often occurs quietly, sustained by roots that remain unseen. |
"Quiet Offering"
5 x 7 inches, 2025 Mixed Media on Canvas This work focuses on quiet emergence and overlooked resilience, using a small cluster of wildflowers as a metaphor for subtle strength and persistence. The oval format narrows the field of vision, creating an intimate, contained space that draws attention inward rather than outward. Soft gradients of green and gold suggest growth, moisture, and filtered light, evoking the understated rhythms of Louisiana’s natural landscape. Against this muted ground, the yellow blooms appear delicate yet intentional, asserting presence without dominance. The flowers do not overwhelm the surface. They occupy it modestly, reflecting forms of endurance that exist without spectacle. Their scale and placement emphasize survival through adaptation rather than force. By isolating a simple, easily overlooked subject within a restrained composition, the work honors the quiet moments of beauty that persist amid uncertainty. This painting asserts that resilience does not always announce itself. Sometimes it appears softly, rooted in place, continuing to grow even when attention is elsewhere. |