Today I’d like to share with you my portfolio that was recently accepted into the Rhode Island School of Design. I hope it can be useful to other students when applying to a competitive school like RISD. While I am unsure if I can secure the necessary financial aid to attend such a prestigious (and expensive) university, I am grateful to have been invited. At any rate, the following works were uploaded to Common Application.
I wanted this painting to be unlike anything I'd done before. I think I succeeded in this goal because everyone who has seen it tells me that it doesn't look like my "typical style." I hear this remark more often than any of them know. The common thread between all of my work is the paying of tribute to a person or idea. In this case, the artist acts on her creative impulse late one Friday night. I gave her five arms because she needed them for the elaborate control panel on the table before her.
This watercolor depicts the city of Lviv in western Ukraine. In 2022 it received the second place award from the WaterMedia Showcase and was exhibited at the Salmagundi Club with the American Watercolor Society. When I look at this painting, I am grateful that these buildings have survived the aggression from Russia. This piece was made with brushes, a sponge, paper towels, fingers, a debit card, an airbrush, a razor blade, and watercolor pencils. It is my fifth attempt at creating this story. I credit its success to the major compositional directions. It feels to me like the movement a conductor makes with their baton: a dominant downbeat with a transitory cross stroke.
This is the largest watercolor painting I've ever made. It hangs in a beautiful home in Daybreak, Utah. It represents a milestone for me because it was the first time I had been charged with a commission. I had only been painting for four years at the time of its completion, and it took all the bravery I had to bring it together by the deadline. I was honored when my client commissioned three more watercolors almost as big. The greatest challenge for me was in creating cohesion between the panels. I wanted each one to carry its own story while contributing to the larger narrative. The reason this was difficult for me is because I was used to creating something entirely different with each new painting. I'm always searching for something that has yet to occur to me.
The lounge where these two drawings now hang is the only place in my hometown to feature the nude form. The freedom I was awarded by the commissioner prompted me to include design elements that most interest me philosophically. These elements include minimalism, expressionism, and line. I feel extremely honored to join so many artists before me who have been inspired by the human body. I do not feel obligated to accurately represent the way the body is; instead, I seek to deconstruct the essential characteristics and directions to push the boundaries of acceptability. I want to allow my creative hand to teach me something that I could never have discovered through observation alone.
This preparatory drawing on tracing paper overlays a sheet of gridded newsprint. I drew each component of my painting on separate sheets of tracing paper so that I could easily reorganize them into various compositions. While I know I can accomplish this in Photoshop, I wanted to handle this more traditionally to slow me down. It is like the difference between using a film camera vs. a digital one. Sacrificing speed forces me to consider more deeply my intent for each segment of the painting.
This piece was created for my second solo exhibition, titled "City of Lions," held at the Orem Public Library in 2023. Despite having five years of experience working with gold leaf, this marked the first occasion where I incorporated it into one of my paintings. The abstraction of the wheat intertwines with the sunflowers, symbolizing the young lady's inextricability to her homeland. The model was a college student whom I would sometimes play chess with near her university. I captured a reference photo of her during my final day in Ukraine, at the tallest point in the city. This piece alludes to the Ukrainian flag, hence the skies above and the wheat below. Throughout its creation, I studied Vincent Van Gogh's works as I rendered the sunflowers. I wanted each petal to draw the viewer deeper into their captivating whirl. This artwork was donated to support Ukrainian refugees in Salt Lake City for Ukrainian Independence Day.
This piece was painted en plein air in Cumberland, MD, for the Mountain Maryland Plein Air Competition. Artist and Juror Charlie Hunter awarded it first place before purchasing it himself. This was a huge honor for me because Charlie has been a favorite painter of mine since 2019. As I painted, workers directed traffic or smoothed cement. I chose to include the workers indirectly because this is how we see them all the time. Sometimes, as I look around, I appreciate all at once the fact that real people designed and built this incredible world. In my picture, this evidence is more prevalent in the wet cement surrounded by traffic cones. We walk on cement every day, but too infrequently do we consider the workers who put it there for us.
This piece was painted en plein air in Heber Valley, UT, for the Wasatch Plein Air Paradise competition. It was awarded the second-place prize among 130 of Utah’s best plein air painters. Most of my questions about picture-making boil down to shape. If I have no shape, then I simply have no picture. I like my shapes to be funny. Even if the picture itself is very serious, an individual shape has a lot of power when it is comical. This tells me that it is performing a distinctive responsibility in accordance with the more general choir of my design. In the technique shown here, paint is applied in a wash and then removed with a brush or Q-tip to reveal the canvas underneath. This brings the negative shape to the frontal plane to maximize the interplay between the major value separations. It was a technique made popular by a favorite painter of mine, Bernie Fuchs.
This commission was based off of Robert Frost's poem A Time to Talk. My client asked for it in remembrance of his father who never fails to make time for those around him. I wanted to capture that moment when farmers set aside their tools to talk with their neighbors. I asked two dear friends to be in the painting. Not only because they are true cowboys, but because they exemplify what it means to make time for those special people in their lives. I directed this scene while my father took reference photos. It is a project like this which reminds me why I chose to make art in the first place; because I get to take away invaluable lessons about the human spirit and its capacity for kindness.
Russian soldiers had just invaded the eastern regions of Ukraine, and my friends there were being issued draft cards. They are just artists like me; but unlike me, they have never held a firearm. My beliefs about art and war had never been challenged like this before. I had to re-center my conviction that art is a powerful force in our societal web, and its potential to incite positive change is unquantifiable. This painting of a Molotov cocktail, burning with blue and yellow flames, evinces my scramble to come to grips with the fact that I could lose people whom I care about more than they will ever know.
This example of a figure drawing was inspired by a live model in Ukraine. I have enjoyed attending life drawing sessions regularly since 2017, and I hope to continue my studies of the human as a life pursuit. I drew this with no aid of photography, relying solely on observational skills to accurately describe the form of the model. Regardless of medium, subject, or style, I always attempt to design in such a way as to promote a common purpose between the elements.
this painting was made with watercolor, pencils, ink, and conte. The life drawing session in Ukraine, where I was first inspired to paint this scene, followed me in my mind until I could no longer ignore it. I wanted to tell the story of two artists at work and emphasize my gratitude for the models who have taught me so much about rhythm and design.
Since an early age, I have developed a deep fascination with philosophy regarding practical micro and macro sociology. I think art is the perfect middle ground to explore these fields for its applicable commentary on humanity's collective consciousness. This painting shows an old city with a modern economic structure. Citizens walking home with their groceries, an off-duty soldier making time for conversation, a bandura player reinterpreting Ukrainian music; each is an indispensable organ to a much wider social network. I entered my photograph into Photoshop to reposition the elements. Photography has brought me an opportunity that poses risks to my work's authenticity. For that reason, I always beg the question “How can I break free from the camera in search of a deeper and more essential quality of light and atmosphere?"
From 2017-2020, I worked at Masterworks Frames as a custom frame maker and gilder. I still represent Masterworks at various art events such as plein air competitions and, most recently, the annual conference of The Portrait Society of America. The attached image shows my responsibilities in the shop. These included, but were not limited to, concept design, building/structure, surface development, gilding, and finally antique.
Art students the world over are frequently required to paint self-portraits. The compulsion to make this attempt of “introspection” is almost mandatory if they want to be taken seriously in the fine art community. But I always have the same response to baseless expectations placed on myself and other students of art: forget it. For this reason, the portrait below is one of only two that I’ve made in the time that I’ve been studying art and painting. You may be disappointed that I have nothing deeper to say about this age-old practice, but at the end of the day, it is just paint, and it gets me no closer to unraveling the confines of my identity than how I take my coffee.
And yet, I am willing to paint my insipid mug on occasion. I believe there are lessons to be learned almost anywhere, as long as I can convince myself that I’m doing it for reasons other than it being practiced by countless “serious“ painters ad nauseam.
To my pleasant surprise, I did experience a degree of freedom as I painted this. I had no expectations of seeing it in a gallery, or in the hands of a collector. Having the very possibility of a monetary return removed from the equation, I allowed myself to paint with essentially no concern for the future. This cannot be said with much of my other work. I paint for a living (albeit not a very profitable one). The question of how to afford more paint, whether I like it or not (and I don’t) does impose itself on my design choices. Whether I would hang this painting in my own home or not is often on my mind, and anyone who remains free of this ball and chain should consider themselves lucky. Would I encourage anyone else to paint a self-portrait? No — I would encourage you to paint period; What you paint is your problem.
