Since I was a child, I knew I was an artist. My father painted and sold his paintings, and I grew up with paint on my fingers, painting beside him. Largely self-taught — documentaries, observation, little houses built out of clay — my hands were always making things. My father told me I had something different. I believed him.

I begin with curiosity — books, images, clean lines, body shapes — and then I disrupt it. Anxiety arrives, and I tear into the composition. That disruption is not the opposite of my work. It is my work. Strong color, irregular forms, and worn, weathered surfaces emerge: doubt turned into beauty. Then I fill what survives with the day I lived — what I felt, what I saw, what I read, what I couldn't stop thinking about. My paintings are diaries. Every one hides something underneath — names, phrases, private material — that I'll never show you. Every one has to hold the memory of the time it was made.

I work with industrial materials — factory paint, filler, things people call cheap. I spent years observing that world, and its cheapness is part of the work's truth. What matters is never what the material costs, but the idea and the condition it carries.

My series American Dream (sixteen works, 2021–2025) comes from lived experience. I worked as a production manager in the factories this project comes from: I pushed workers to meet production targets while facing those same pressures myself. I built it from the materials of survival: wire, chains, found objects, industrial remnants, inexpensive paint and clothing worn by a woman held in immigration detention. It looks at labor, migration and survival, and asks a hard question of its own title. It is political because I won't look away from what is in front of me, but I refuse to be only that. It is not only about migrants: it speaks to workers, families and people whose lives are shaped by systems that fail to protect them.

My early works were my education — small, stubborn pieces made with whatever I had, where I learned to trust my hands before any theory. American Dream was the reckoning. Autumn — four works from a season of going inward — is where I stand now: black and white, heavy texture, memory pressed into the surface, even a small photograph of myself hidden in one of them. The Studies on Paper are my laboratory: nine small experiments in color and gesture, where I let myself play. The Autumn works and the Studies are available from the studio — a finished painting wants to live somewhere, not in storage.

I make this work for myself — to prove to myself that I can — not to defeat anyone. I'd rather you feel disgusted than feel nothing.

If you see injustice, say something. Speak up. Don't be part of it.