Laguna College of Art + Design

Finding beauty in ordinary objects excites me. In each still life, I use ordinary vessels as my subject matter. I paint them in oil in a classical and traditional style. I use ceramic vessels in Oriental and simple design because they helps to creat…

I Remember. I Remember – the scent on my mother carries love and comfort. Even though she is not physically with me, her blessing and love stay with me in my memories. Losing my mother is the trigger for me to paint my memories. I experienced …

The formal elements of my work respond to conflicting visual dualities in water. Water is a substance that can be both transparent and opaque. It allows its mysteries to stay hidden, or to loom eerily beneath its glassy surface. Realism defines thes…

Our ethics, logic, and aesthetics are highly dependent on the environment to which we belong. In one community such as a country, family, ethnicity, or generation, people may hold beliefs that feel like “common sense” to the people who b…

My experiences, memories, dreams, and ideas are externalized and made lyrical through my oil paintings on canvas. I respond to motifs and subjects from art history, and this body of work is especially informed by the Baroque period and artists inclu…

Is plastic surgery feminist? Why can I not see myself as a whole whenever I look into the mirror? Advertisements and social media instruct young women to meticulously analyze and obsess over their bodies. Why do I and others worship and partake in t…

My paintings reflect my recent life experience and my thoughts about old Chinese wisdom such as Taoism and yin-yang. Yin and yang reflect the symbiotic polarity in my paintings—love and loneliness, movement and stillness, solitude and connecti…

Through my study of landscape and portraiture I have found that there are many ways of interpreting and composing a representation of the world. This body of work represents earthquakes and disasters with the knowledge that I have gained from my stu…

My recent body of work delves into the peculiar absurdity of my American experience, using iconic county fair imagery to engage with the excesses, hopes, violence, and delusions pervasive in American culture. Humor becomes my tool to navigate and co…

This piece was included in the Society of Illustrators 63rd Exhibition.

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 …

There is power in rhythmic images. This series of artworks is meant to discover the presence of patterns in a project that could be seen as introspective and exploratory. Sewing patterns, patterned fabrics and papers, charcoals, and soft pastels ble…

Solitude is something that resonates with all of us, whether we like it or not. Philosophers and psychologists have spent ages studying how we respond to it. My thesis paintings capture my own feelings and reflections on solitude. In my art, I often…

A Bridge between Worlds is a series of narrative paintings that explore symbolism and allegory. They are executed in a traditional, representational style, synthesizing the classical, naturalist, symbolist, and contemporary genres of painting. The a…

Jonathon Shay, in Achilles in Vietnam, wrote that he is “deeply opposed to war, but just as deeply respectful of the soldier” (Shay1994, 206). This sentiment reflects my exact feelings and motivations for the seven paintings in my thesis…

The people that I have painted in my MFA thesis series have suffered indignities, hardship, and sometimes the loss of their individual freedoms. Due to a variety of circumstances, they found themselves in situations that were dire. Often, their live…

In the film American Psycho, Patrick Bateman stares blankly at his reflection in the mirror as he states, “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory—I sim…