“I work with oil pastels primarily, on paper, using oil paint for the background and blocking.

It’s funny because when I was a kid I HATED it when we had to use oil pastels in school. I hated how sloppy and messy they were. I wanted to create in the way that the drawing books and painting books at the library depicted: neat and orderly, a seemingly RIGHT way of doing things, with a vast array of tools and supplies.

That changed when I was a teenager. My appreciation for oil pastels started because they allowed me to express myself, to get my body into it, to use all the frustration and anger I was experiencing (sigh…being a teenager is f*cking hard) and turn it into something. In fact, I would wait until I was upset to create (I never had to wait long).

For some reason when I started to commit myself to an art journey a few years ago, I thought it HAD to be with paint in order to be a REAL artist, and as good as that part of my journey was, as much as it taught me, I learned something else…that there’s a reason we’re connected to certain mediums, and that denying that was…well…committing to what I thought I SHOULD do, rather than what made sense for me.

SO, oil pastels it is, for now, until another journey takes me…”

LA