Making art has always felt a lot like keeping a journal for me—only instead of sentences, I work with color, movement, and shape.
I don’t sit down at the studio table with a plan to document my life. There’s no intention to explain or define what’s happening. And yet, when I look back at older paintings, I can clearly see where I was at that moment in time. The palette shifts. The energy changes. Some periods feel quiet and restrained, others more expansive or layered. Together, they form a kind of visual record.
Like journaling, painting allows me to process things I don’t always have words for. There are experiences that live more comfortably in color than in language—grief, anticipation, joy, uncertainty, relief. When I paint, those feelings can exist without being analyzed or justified. They simply get to be present on the canvas.
I think this is why abstraction feels so honest to me. It doesn’t require explanation. It leaves space for ambiguity, for contradiction, for change. Much like a written journal, a painting doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else in order to be meaningful. Its value comes from the act of showing up and responding to the moment.
Over time, patterns emerge. Certain shapes repeat themselves. Colors I once avoided start to appear more often. Softer tones come and go. These aren’t conscious decisions as much as quiet signals—markers of where my attention and emotions have been settling.
What I also love is that this visual journal remains open-ended. A written entry can feel fixed once it’s on the page. A painting, on the other hand, continues to evolve in how it’s seen and felt. Even years later, I notice things I hadn’t noticed before. The work grows alongside me.
In that way, painting becomes less about producing something and more about staying connected—to myself, to my surroundings, to the passing of time. It’s a gentle practice of noticing. Of listening. Of allowing things to surface when they’re ready.
And maybe that’s what keeps me coming back to the studio, day after day. Not to record life exactly as it is, but to leave traces of how it feels.