Laguna College of Art + Design

Instinct represents an exploration of an inner wilderness by way of an outer one,

premised on my beliefs about the continuity of these seemingly disparate landscapes. This

body of work is meant to trace the organic growth and evolution of a project that could be

seen in turn as psychological, personal, spiritual, and artistic. My work has always been an

act of reverence for the natural world. There is an element of science in it, in the desire to

study and observe. But there is an element of spirit, too, in the continual reaching for

something just beyond the visible. To this end, these layered encaustics and charcoal

drawings describe a return first to some of the fundamental mythic archetypes that inform my

creative process, and eventually, to the simplest visual elements of our world: light and dark.

Instinct explores—through appropriately monochromatic and simple media—the interplay of

these forces: the way in which they define our world, map our landscape, and determine what

it known to us…and what is unknown.