Doing an artist residency! I attended the Archipelago Art Residency in Korpo, Finland (AARK) for two months in 2022. This residency was the best investment I have ever made for my art. Through the solitude and time it gave me to focus on nothing but art-making and enjoying the beautiful Finnish forest and sea, I was able to excite myself artistically in ways that I hadn’t since I was a teenager. (Also got to cosplay being a local in a tiny town on a tiny island in the Baltic Sea, I’m sorry nothing is better than that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.) I highly suggest attending an art residency in a faraway place that you’ve always wanted to go or a random place that excites you. It will lead to cool stuff I promise!

Yeah! I am a visual artist and psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. I mainly make oil paintings and mixed media work with epoxy resin, though I also make smaller works on paper and occasionally sculpture. One day I’d like to make my drawings into a children’s book. In addition to being an artist, I am a trained psychotherapist and work with teenagers, adults, and children who struggle with their mental health/past trauma. My art is informed by my work in psychology, often centering around themes such as childhood trauma, family dynamics, psychosis, and the delicacy of human emotions. I also work conceptually at times, bringing found objects and DIY research projects into my artwork. I recently had my first solo exhibition called “The Skeletons Are Singing Again” at Mascot in Los Angeles (see mascot-studio.com/no-13), comprised of paintings that visually depict the way children might interpret dark family secrets or traumas that their parents appear to ignore.

One of the most important lessons I have learned is that art you don’t enjoy the process of making is not worth making. Painting used to be this masochistic process for me where I would dread doing it and feel miserable until I was finally finished and euphoria hit. While I did make work that I was proud of, I had a really hard time painting consistently and my output was low. Simply by shifting my perspective and making some minor technical changes, I now savor my time in the studio and look forward to painting. As a result, I can now make more work more quickly, and am much happier in general.

During a critique in one of my undergraduate art classes, a professor looked at one of my paintings and said, “I can’t explain why, but this painting is about to make me cry.” That, I have learned, is my goal: to make artwork that elicits strong emotion in the viewer. We live in a disgraceful world where life is so hard that we tend to spend too much time disconnected from reality or numbed out. I would like to make work that stands against this, that pulls the viewer into the present moment and forces them to feel something.