Investigates

Investigates transformation through embodied acts of release.

Statement

Casting Paintings marked my return to the studio after nearly a decade away from making art. During those years I had devoted myself to building a career in New York real estate, eventually reaching the highest position available to me within my company. Although I had achieved the professional success I had worked toward, I realized that somewhere along the way I had left behind a part of myself. Returning to the studio became less about making paintings and more about finding my way back to the artist I had always been.

Each work emerged through an intensely physical process performed on a table using acrylic paint, graphite, oil pastel, rollers, and paintbrushes. The paintings were built through pressure, compression, lifting, dragging, and repeated movement across the surface. The process was physically demanding—at times leaving me exhausted—and transformed emotional tension into material form. Rather than illustrating frustration or grief, the work became a place where those emotions could be moved through, reshaped, and released.

The title Casting Paintings comes from the idea of casting experience into the work itself. Inspired by the symbolic qualities of smoky quartz—a stone often associated with transformation and release—each painting became a record of an internal shift. The synchronistic numbers embedded in the titles mark moments of alignment within that process. Together, the works explore the possibility that making can become a practice of returning to oneself, where the finished painting is not the objective, but the visible evidence that transformation has already taken place.

Research Question

Can creative practice become a process of returning to oneself?

Finding

Transformation is not something we think our way into. It is something we move our way through.