&
Stones
Feathers
About
I have always loved the arts, especially painting and photography. I studied art intensively during high school and college.
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I was the personal assistant of artist Candy Nartonis, who mentored and taught me the language of the brush. My first solo exhibition of photography was at the Heinz Berggruen Gymnasium in Berlin, Germany, in 2010, the latest solo show of paintings at Principia College, Elsah, Illinois, in 2017. During a nine month trip through Latin America, I worked for an NGO in Ecuador and taught art to indigenous and local kids and have worked as a freelance photographer ever since.
Since my Senior year in College, transcendental ideas and how they relate to the every-day life of all of us have moved up front, topics like “transformative solitude”, “surrendering and restoring”, and “the essence of friendship”. My exploration of spirituality and understanding my relationship to God have been key to my art making.
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As of today, my paintings have been bought by people across the United States, Germany, Norway and Canada, where they hang in private homes and organizations.
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Why do i make art?
I have never been able to separate my art from the mental process that liberates and yet ensnares me daily. I often ask myself why I paint and why I always get drawn back to the canvas, the messy oil paints, the dripping pinks and blues. I come back to the mysterious nature of life itself, which leaves me with questions to which language seems to lack sufficient access. I yearn to find artistic answers, profound answers, which often means leaving language behind.
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Concepts and questions I have pondered lately have been:
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Is it possible to depict artistically true surrender to God?
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How is solitude transformative?
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Are humility and power linked?
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Can art resist environmental destruction? How?
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What does the coincidence of the human and the divine truly mean?
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How can human life be uplifted and enriched through divine Love?
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What is the true and deep potential of friendship?
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Can something we have lost – even if that be a sense of who we are - be restored to us?
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All my work tries to engage the ephemeral part of story-telling, something that connects different ideas and experiences. It seems to me that the nature of the concepts I ponder, call for answers that aren’t earth-bound and representative, but float in a different dimension that holds hands with imagination and spiritual sense.
I prefer to paint with oils and use tools that include different brushes, palette knives and different pieces of cardboard and paper. Oil paint gives me the feeling that I am working with another being: Since it dries slowly, my palette paints with--and sometimes--against my sense of control.
In my process, I have found that the more I work with spiritual concepts first and let go of any notion of wanting to be this or that, the more liberated and easy painting becomes. It is unselfed love and humility that encourage me to give my work up to God and have Him/Her outline the work. I know today, that without humility and meekness, I would not be able to paint.