My Art

My work is inspired by the simultaneous resilience + fragility of life; it is both strong and soft, simple and meaningful, and I find comfort in the magic of it all. Flowers + plants have been life-long reminders of that for me.

I love playing with both muted tones + rich colors, crisp modern lines + flowing, sinuous shapes — so my paintings are a mishmash of inspiration, feelings, and life, all by intention. I paint primarily by intuition to infuse my work with more emotion, spirit + haphazard beauty.

My Story

I have been painting and drawing since I was a child — my grandma was an artist and she gave me my first set of watercolor paints. She played around with a lot of different mediums, but watercolor held my heart from the very start.

There was something about its fluidity and softness, and the way mistakes could be blotted away on paper towels if you caught them soon enough. It was freedom, to me.

I drifted away from watercolor for awhile, and tried to cover up my artistic self entirely. I spent several years knuckled down in homework and then drowning in mundane desk jobs, all the while, doodling flowers in the margins of every scrap paper and Post-it note I could get my hands on, coveting all the best ink pens in the office, and color-coding the files that no one else looked at.

I could only take so much of that. Major life events piled on to the mindless monotony of my life, and before I knew it my clinical depression drastically worsened. I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety, and for a long time I struggled to find the correct medication and dosage. The brain fog (my therapist later referred to it as psychomotor retardation) from my depression was so thick, I struggled to string together sentences. I could barely complete the simplest tasks. I couldn’t get out of bed. I had tried everything I could, and suicide began to seem like the only possible way to feel relief. I thought about it everyday.

I finally ended up losing my job.

I turned to watercolor painting, the one thing that I could still somehow do without being able to think clearly. I buried myself in paintings while I figured out how to keep living… or, rather, did whatever my therapist told me to and hoped one day I’d want to live again.

Time passed, and after a lot of trial-and-error, some medication changes, hours of therapy, and quite honestly a lot of prayer, I found myself again. Painting became my passion, and an essential part of my life and my healing.

I opened my small online art shop in February of 2020, and running it since then has been my dream come true. Especially in the midst of a pandemic, when everyone’s mental health was challenged so intensely — it gave me a way to stay afloat, and a way to feel like I was making some kind of difference in the world.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in me and sharing my joy as I rebuilt myself, and learned what it was like to feel alive again. I am so endlessly grateful.