Surface Dives: a dive made from the surface of the water; a technique used in underwater searches.

I depict the human body submerged and navigating through water as a means to show an unrelenting search for clarity in an individual’s self-perception.

For the past couple of years, I have been fascinated with painting water, and it has become an evolving symbol in my work. This began with a desire to paint a combination of my inner thoughts and emotions with outside, tangible reality. I have always had a connection to water, finding that being near it helps me gain perspective, and being immersed in it (i.e swimming, bathing) is highly therapeutic. With water on my mind, I turned to a long (and admittedly clichéd) visual history that ties the image of water to the (sub/un)conscious. There’s something to be said, however, about the frequency of this connection. Water can visually distort, abstract, soften, obstruct and clearly reflect reality, and in many ways we can do the same in our minds – in our memories and perceptions. These visuals of water help me communicate diverse complex ideas and at the same time serve as technical, aesthetic challenges, allowing me to explore the wide and seductive range of paint. Mixing, layering, blending areas of abstraction and clarity, my paintings inhabit the space of the real, but lay somewhere between our internal and external reality.