What memory keeps.

Some paintings begin as a sketch. Others begin as a feeling that won't leave.

My work draws from memory, observation, and imagination — often all at once — tracing the connections between people, and between who we are now and who we once were. These are paintings about memory and connection: the gathering of family, friends, and relatives in a crowded room; the chance meeting of old friends after years apart; the empty space on New Year's Eve where someone you loved used to be. I am drawn to the moments where presence and absence overlap — where the people in a room and the people missing from it occupy the same frame.

I have painted for sixteen years, the last six with deeper intention — a willingness to follow a painting past its original idea into territory I hadn't planned. My childhood and the memories I carry live inside the work without always announcing themselves. They surface in the emotional temperature of a color, in the faces, in the weight of certain silences.

The series moves from noise toward solitude. From crowds, to two people who run into each other by accident after years of separation, to a single figure alone on New Year's Eve, to a red room where a father develops photographs in the dark. Each painting is a different kind of distance — and a different kind of memory. Some hold the warmth of being surrounded; others hold what remains after everyone has gone. Together, they map what it costs to move through the world alongside other people, and what stays with us once they are no longer there.