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…

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…

Growing up in the Mormon religion, I had the unusual experience of being taught about a female deity. While many Mormon women find the idea of a female deity empowering, some are disturbed that she is nearly invisible within Mormon religious discour…

A personal confession can be a meaningful articulation of how individuals are all related in society, nature and the fundamental aspects of humanity. Those records can give us a deeper appreciation of life and understanding of who we are and where w…

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…

All living things communicate, but humans have the most complex systems for doing so with approximately 3000–6000 spoken languages. Our need for language is constant. Without it, we cease to be part of a community, a culture, a group. Our cohe…

My work explores the juicy world of color, shuffling bright hues together like a stack of paint chips and choosing the boldest and most saturated as the primary vehicle for the expression of the piece. Portraits are the current subject that I use to…

At 8 years old, I was severely injured in a very serious car accident which resulted in a coma for a week. This was an event that changed a lot of people's lives within my family. The scene was so horrific, it was only told with metaphors to lighten…

As a painter who hunts, my art concerns the dialectics of hunting. How can I say, “I love deer” while I am in pursuit to shoot one? Why is it that I am both remorseful and happy when I stand over an elk whose life I cut short? Where is t…

My paintings move through the shadow of my past life. I was born and grew up in post-revolutionary Iran, in a culture dominated by patriarchal governments and households. As a young woman in Iran, I saw wars, protest, and revolution. My early experi…

My narrative paintings explore a fantasy realm that I call the flooded world, loosely inspired by my home on the expansive floodplains of East Texas. Using the imagery of high water to capture a moment of disrupted reality, my paintings respond to a…