Artist Statement

In my series titled An Inventory of Traces, each gradient is a vignette of an experience, place, or person. I attempt to commit important events in my life to memory via painting. I mine color from memory, photos, interviews, and artifacts from my family. Paint mixed with either cold wax or pumice medium is swiped across the canvas to conceal extraneous possibilities. Simultaneously, illusionistic space is anticipated and denied. A thin trace of color is revealed. Skin tones, a day at the beach, hiking up a mystical mountain in the Philippines, my parents’ backyard, a city sidewalk, aging postcards from my uncle to my grandparents dating back to the 1970s, the bayous in Louisiana where Filipinos used to hide, the shapes of rivers, moving back to Virginia. Color triggers these recollections.

The Inventory is a collection of color studies based on experiences that have shaped my life. Lines, likeness, and edges are absent but the pigments remain. Movement and flow within the compositions connote time. I approach this ongoing series like a sentimental hoarder of memories. Each gradient and incision are both spectacular and everyday, familiar and distant. The paintings are quiet provocations, asking the viewer to reflect on the meanings and power of color.