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 culmination of this body of works is centered on my experiences. The paintings of this series follow the story of my life at this time in the past and the present. I want to depict places and people that mark a specific time and place in my life…

Steven Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, in The Grand Design, coined the term “model-dependent realism”, claiming that everything we know about reality is from observations based on models. They believe that different world picture models pr…

My current body of work explores notions of mortality, vulnerability, loss, and survival. Over the last decades, these ideas have shaped my emotional landscape and have led to an investigation of the psychological and physiological circumstances tha…

Holding Still and Letting Go captures powerful personal emotions and intimate experiences and transforms them symbolically as universal expressions for the human condition. The themes in this collection are based on two profound periods—during…

My artwork often reflects an inner world that can be described as “Synthetic Realism.” Robert McKee, a former art professor at Yale University, used the label to loosely describe a form of art that although rooted in realism, manipulates…

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…

My paintings are allegories of self-awareness. They acknowledge the universal realities of life, love, and loss. Blending elements of nostalgia and contemporary experience, I create non-linear narratives embedded with symbolism and metaphor. My focu…

My current body of work is a personal narrative about my experiences with chronic illness, specifically the human Parvo B19 virus. I paint figurative and still life paintings that address themes, of private pain vs. public persona, fight and submiss…

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…

In elementary school, I recall sitting outside on an overcast day on the playground, observing the sheet of gray that blanketed the sky. Small pockets of light periodically pierced through the transient clouds, transforming the once moody landscape …

This thesis work examines themes of family and marriage. In particular it explores domesticity with its associated anxiety, and the attempt to escape from such. For me this anxiety stems from the uncertainty that originates with the possibility of f…

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…

In this thesis, I question, reflect on, and navigate the cultural and societal challenges women face in Iran through my oil paintings. I create visual narratives with archetypal imagery depicting women's multifaceted experiences. Using symbolic imag…