The Garden of Eve

After graduate school, I kept painting, asking questions, experimenting, searching, with moderate success along the way. My work is not consistent. I am a restless artist. My painting practice does not accommodate the art market. In 2009, I found a new PhD program designed for MFA grads in philosophy and theory of art. I spent the following two years travelling to New York and Europe for coursework and exposure to scholars from European universities. It was the light that awakened my thinking to the practice of making art and how it connects to being human. I found my tribe: philosophers who cared about art, wrote about it, theorized about it, and struggled with where it fit into being human. What does it mean to be an artist? How does my humanness live in my work? What does my visual language contribute to the authenticity of painting? Questions with no answers, just thinking. Reading philosophy was the missing link between who I was, how I felt, and what I wanted to do as an artist.

"The Garden of Eve" explores the boundary between chaos and cultivation where the abstract and the organic intertwine. The work reimagines the garden, not as a tranquil refuge, but as a living, evolving field of energy, lush and unruly. Flickering marks for vine and root-like forms suggest uncontainable growth. Color functions as emotion and structure-vertical bands create scaffolding in which blooms emerge and dissolve. The ambiguity of flowers falling or rising blurs the distinction between the cycles of creation and decay. The painting proposes that abstraction can evoke a deeply personal, human, and relational experience by triggering our aliveness, recollections, projections, and revisions of our world. It asks what it means to live within the beauty of constant transformation-where the boundaries between the cultivated and the wild, between the sacred and the sensual, are perpetually redrawn. Eve's question: What does it mean to be?