Artist Statement:

When I was young, my father had always encouraged me to further develop my creative side. his faith in my ability gave me the freedom to imagine, and I would paint or sketch my thoughts onto a canvas so that I could show the part of myself, which is
less apparent to the eye. I feel compelled to explore, and somehow display the invisible beauty that we have within--this is why I became an artist.

I am a person who enjoys the simplest things in life - the breeze moving my hair, the sun on my face, a kid’s smile and those minutes in the evening when everything glows in a pale purple just before the sunset.

What inspires me to create my paintings is the beauty I see in simple things – colours, textures, patterns and forms. To create my artwork and to avoid the flatness of 2D media (as in a canvas painting), sometime I use a mixture of clay dust, sand, cloth and acrylic polymers. When mixed together in different proportions and applied with knife on a flat canvas, I can create endless variations of textures and 3D finishes.

“The creative process for me is one that is both automatic and emotional. A lot of my works focus on the struggle between good and evil… dark and light. With almost every painting or mixed media work I create, I come to a point of complete and utter frustration with the work. One minute I‘m in the studio cursing like a drunken sailor… an hour later I’m looking down at the same work saying, “absolutely perfect!”. The real ‘art’ for me in the creation process is the fact that I don’t rip the work to shreds before I complete it.”

In the journey, not the destination is where our minds are truly free to experience and develop an understanding about life...

In the most intimate moments in life, a space exists where we can tear down the social constructs of modern day perceptions about who we are and how we relate to life and love and death. In todays industrialized and service oriented world we are presented with an image at birth of who we are to become and exactly how it is that we are to achieve this. This creates a feeling of isolation and separateness from the world around us and from ourselves. We are eager to connect with each other, with nature, We also have a deep-seated need to believe in something greater than ourselves in hopes of realizing the connection we hold to the things around us. It is in the most intimate moments in life that these connections and realizations are made; in standing on a mountaintop communing with nature, in a loving embrace, in a passionate love affair, in that last breath of life before one dies... These moments create a space where an understanding develops about who we are and how we connect to life and to each other. I'm drawn to search out and recreate the space that these moments provide; in this endeavour it is more important to follow the path until its discovery, rather than relying on the established convention of focusing on the end product as the means in which to arrive at the destination.