In my life I’ve been a drunk, a junky, a whore, and a liar. I have had many identities and not a single one of them has made sense to me. I’m an artist. When I paint I use everything I have, my body, mind and spirit smeared onto the page. Splashed and dripped and squeezed, extruded and ground into it. When I leave the studio I am emptied out. I’m dessicated and frustrated, dirty and aching, exhilarated and intoxicated with love for the practice. 

As I walk home through the night I see light and dark flit in turn before my eyes. Cars and lamp posts hum, a tune of wavering brightness piercing the murky evening colors, something eerie, something familiar. I’ve wandered these streets before, they are well known to me. From a time when sinister designs propelled me through the dark. With a hungry fire in my belly, itching in my bones, an empty, gaping cavity in my being I sauntered towards oblivion.

Still the filth clings to me, a film of oil from swimming through polluted waters, but now I am on the other shore. Each stone of the path I tread, once the stomping grounds of demons, now an arena for the barrage of questions that stream forth ceaselessly. Why am I here? Why have these things happened to me? What is wrong and why can’t I be right?

With gesture and frantic action, I manipulate pigments to create work that contemplates these questions that I desperately wish to be answered. But the reality is that answers don’t always exist. Sometimes we wander in the dark without purpose because our feet compel us to do so and that’s okay because it is the musing that sustains us through the cold dark night. The searching brings us to the center of things where it is warm and light, for in the searching we are present, we exist. It is about the journey.

My stories are intense, purposefully ambiguous and confrontational. My writing is a blend of poetry and autobiography, and my current paintings exist in an ostensibly narrative space. Utilizing my personal history of sex work and drug addiction, I create compositions of figures in the dark, in the woods or park, lost and alone. It is a narrative but also metaphoric landscape. The park is just a journey through unfamiliar territory, the cruising is a longing for any type of intimacy to soothe the aching of loneliness. The hustler could be anyone.