Alleyways at night time might not be where one would voluntarily stroll through to find beauty, but for the past year that was the only place where I found it. Los Angeles is a patchwork of crowded neighborhoods, rising and falling terrain, and an endless web of intertwining freeways. But in the alleyways throughout the city I have found an unpretentious world of solitary shadows, quiet scenes, and secret lives hidden amongst the busy boulevards that surround them. The shadows cast from blue fluorescent and ochre iridescent bulbs stuck to nondescript walls like abstract paintings on canvas. Often quiet and still the mood felt tense, reminiscent of a film noir.

With this series the most important element for me to create was the mood for each piece; to not only transport the viewer to where I was but to share with them the feeling I felt along my exploration. The tension between light and dark in my pieces is essential for orchestrating that quiet, reflective mood. I attempt to build a world on canvas as real as possible while giving as little information as I can letting certain details hide in shadows and transform whole houses and trees into simplified silhouettes.

Fine Line is my new experimental series that visually manipulates landscapes, presenting them as surreal and graphic works of art. I do so by starting with a scene on a simple horizon line and cut it into different parts, each exploring the scene at different times of day, different subject matters, and done so with different styles of painting.

This series was inspired by the juxtaposition of the way my surroundings are presented to me via reality and the way I choose to see my surroundings within my own imagination. While my series Solitary Shadows is grounded in reality and explores the way something so ordinary can become cinematic when given its own platform to be observed and admired, Fine Line is about asking and answering the question “what if…?” Small and purposeful changes that create different narratives within each viewer. The stories we come up within our minds are often times more fascinating and true than what reality can give us, because we are responsible for filling in the blanks. My work is just a vehicle to spark the imagination of the viewers, to present thought-provoking images os a world so similar yet different from our own.

The composition of the pieces were inspired loosely by Mondiran’s graphic paintings. He expertly balanced line and color in his work, and in mine I strove to create the same balance. moving the viewers eyes across the piece while also separating the composition into individual visuals that come together to tell a larger story.