What was your first introduction to art?

I was gifted a box of crayons when I was really, really, really young and the first thing I did was peel off the wrappers, organize them to take photos of them so I didn't even use them to draw at first… I've been drawing for so long. Like everything I saw I would just try to get down visually. And then I thought about things in different ways like the shapes of vases or like what my dad’s head looks like…

When did you know you wanted to be an artist?

Ever since I started doing it that's just all I was doing and I put my all into it. And I just naturally kept going with it and I guess up until- well I guess career-wise, I decided in like f****** 8th grade because when going to high school I had to choose which school to go to… which had art. I had to test into the school.

If you weren't doing art what would you be doing?

Well I’ve always been interested in nature and death. 

I’m sitting in your studio and it looks really scientific. I see some charts and some writing, it looks like science makes its way into your art a lot.

Yeah. Science definitely makes its way in. Sometimes I combine science with spirituality, which would be considered “pseudoscience” but I think it’s important to look at it as a way of thinking and coming to conclusions rather than just bullsh*t… I don't really believe in astrology or the use of crystals and stuff, but I think there’s other ways that physics and spirituality can come together… and open a lot of doors.

Do you have any inspiration as far as pseudoscience, or myth, lore or religion that you were introduced to? Or do you just follow your interpretation of what you see?

I think it's a mix. I was introduced to the concept of death at a really young age. And also religion. And I feel like that really shaped the way I thought about things. But I had so many questions about everything. I had a really scientific brain. I think that religion and spirituality are important to think about. Because origin, ancestry, creation, cycles, are all really important to think about.

Totally!

As well as science. One doesn’t go over the other. We get information, create a hypothesis, test it out, and see what's true and not. And it's all based on the info we receive, and we get answers from that. But there are certain things that are out of reach right now. Once we get to them, it could provide new information and new truths.

Can you talk about your introduction to death?

(long pause)

So I’m gonna talk about it without revealing a lot.

Sure.

So, death is all around us all the time. Things, people, die all the time… there's so many causes… You never know when someone’s going to die… When I was really young, like a lot of kids, I realized I’m not going to be here forever, and the people around me won’t either… 

I don't know how to explain it… I started thinking “where do you go?”. I asked my dad… and he kind of didn't have an answer. 

Years later when I was 7, 8 or 9, I thought of the surrealness of the fact that we come up and then die, and the randomness of life and death... I saw some stupid conspiracy thing and started thinking “what if it’s all a projection?”, if someone can say the moon’s a hologram, we can also be projections, and our thoughts can be projections. I started thinking, what matters? What doesn’t matter? Maybe nothing matters. In a fake world there are real consequences. 

It sounds like you really internalized death and the things we don’t see. It seems like you’re viewing death as a mystery, but also something to accept.

It’s funny because I was way more accepting when I was younger. As I got older, I got more anxiety about it. The comfort has gone away because of the sh*t I’ve seen on earth.

Yeah, those “real consequences”.

The consequences become much more real. There are types that are way more sinister than your child brain can imagine. The world’s a beautiful place, don’t get me wrong, but sh*t is just really dark.

And maybe time passing, a consequence in itself. 

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, too. I end up wasting a lot of time. It feels like I physically have to push back time. But also, a really comfortable thought is that we experience time linearly. But that's just us. There’s infinite moments in time, but they did happen and will happen, and I feel like those things can be accessed right now through memory and meditation and smells and sights, but I feel like spots in time can be accessed. 

Can you introduce me to your artwork?

I don’t know how to give it an introduction. I’ve always done atmospheric landscape stuff, like portals, nature, background receding, something looking like something else. I try to incorporate the concept of time with these patterns that resemble fossils and nature overgrowth on something that looks manmade. But that wasn’t enough, so I started thinking about paint itself. Something really important that I’m working on right now is creating an environment that conveys sentience, but not through the obvious eyes or human things. And I figured out that I can just do that through natural patterns and color vibration. 

Wow, that’s really interesting. 

Like in my painting in the undergrad thesis show, I was thinking a lot about how color can create like an eye-thing… They’re unnatural colors but they make sense with the world. 

Something I think about with that painting is a coral reef, which is alive, though it’s not obvious because it doesn’t function like us. 

And because it’s stationary. Most people don’t think of something that’s stationary as alive. 

I wanted to ask you about sentience and what that means- maybe it’s consciousness, or a god, or the way a predator watches its prey?

Maybe this sounds goofy, but I think that every single thing is alive. Everything has an aliveness to it and a level of consciousness. Obviously this chair isn't going to get up and walk around… but it has a consciousness to it. Everything is made of the same stuff. What created everything, a higher power god, the big bang… whatever created this whole thing put pieces of itself inside every single thing, and therefore all of its creation has life to it. I don’t know if we’re all intertwined or if were all the same thing inside a different thing, if that makes sense, I just know somehow- this isn’t based in reality- but I just know that everything is alive and intertwined and connected somehow. And I wanted to portray that because it’s really really important to think about.

Is there truth in your paintings?

Yeah, but I don't know what it is. I still struggle to understand what I make, I still struggle to understand myself… when I am with my painting alone I still can’t understand it… it’s constantly changing.