I have been making art for as long as I can remember. I began private lessons when I was eight years old and, by eighteen, I was teaching others. I attended Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, first studying Graphic Design before realizing that what I truly wanted was to make art.

In the mid-1980s, I moved to San Antonio and found myself surrounded by a culture that awakened something in me: the color, celebrations, spirituality, and deep devotion to family. Those experiences became part of me and eventually part of the visual language of my work.

My journey later took me to New Orleans, a place I fell deeply in love with. I was drawn to its mystery, its Creole traditions, weathered architecture, layers of history, and the feeling that the past was never very far away. Years after I left, Hurricane Katrina swept away many of the galleries, artists, and places that had helped shape my creative life. Something shifted in me, and eventually I stepped away from making art.

For nearly a decade, I turned inward. I was searching for meaning, although at the time I’m not sure I knew exactly what I was looking for. I chanted with Buddhist teachers, lit lanterns with Hindu spiritualists, sang and danced with Sufis, and studied in silence with Gnostic Christians. I went looking for answers and instead began to recognize something much simpler and more profound: beneath the different ways we understand this life, there is something deeply human that connects us.

It was my father who ultimately brought me back to art. Near the end of his life, he told me he wanted to see me painting again. His words reached a part of me I had almost forgotten was there. When I finally picked up a brush again, it was more than returning to art. It felt like returning to myself.

I came home to San Antonio and began again—with older hands, a softer heart, and a different understanding of why I needed to create.

Today, my work begins with memory: the places I have lived, the people I have loved, the things I have carried with me, and the experiences that continue to shape who I am. San Antonio, New Orleans, Mexico, and the landscapes of Texas all live somewhere within the work: their colors, spirituality, architecture, traditions, and traces of lives that came before.

I build my paintings slowly, layering paint onto paper and then doing something that has become deeply meaningful to me: I cut it apart. I rearrange those fragments and bring them back together on wood panels before covering the surface with translucent layers of beeswax. Some things remain visible. Others become obscured, and some disappear almost completely.

I am drawn to this process because it feels so much like life itself.

There is a surrender in cutting apart something I have created and trusting that the pieces will find their way into something I could not have planned. I think life asks the same of us. We change, question, let go, begin again, and somehow carry pieces of every experience forward. Even the things we can no longer clearly see remain somewhere beneath the surface.

After more than four decades of making art, I have come to understand that although a painting may begin with my story, I don't want it to remain only mine. I leave space within the work for the viewer—for their memories, their questions, their joys, and the pieces of their own lives they carry with them.

Sometimes a color, a shape, or something barely visible beneath the wax awakens a memory in someone that has nothing to do with what I was thinking when I created the painting.

That may be the moment that matters most to me. It is the moment when my story and someone else's meet.

Perhaps that is why I continue to make art. Not to provide answers, but to create a place where, for just a moment, we might recognize something of ourselves in one another. A quiet reminder that beneath all our different stories are threads that connect us, reminding us that none of us travels through this beautiful, complicated life entirely alone.