The focus of my work is intuitive painting to create external images that match internal storylines. These storylines or narratives are based in basic themes from my inner states as a therapist and woman of color, elements of nature, and processing past and present memories. I was drawn to work as a therapist based on my ability to connect with
others while negotiating how to be a Spanish speaking Chinese Lebanese woman. Much of my work addresses this connection while acknowledging the extreme isolation that I experienced at my birth. I was born as a micropremie at 24 weeks when the age of viability in the mid 1980s was 28. There is no literal medical explanation of how or why I survived. I feel that this has marked me in ways I am just finding as I grew older. I use intuition to try and reclaim some of this lost strength and uncertainty.
The texture, landscape, composition, and color elements focus on the interactions between the natural environment and individuals in times of distress, distraction, or trying to awaken. The color saturation and thickness of the paint or precision of detail encapsulates unprocessed or latent emotions that lie at the surface of most of out
day to day lives, belying a richness, depth, and darkness that we block out using various forms of avoidance, technology, and past pain.
The work hopes to strive to bring elements of magic, wonder, and curiosity back to the pain and fear that we also experience in our lives. Reality is what we make it and memories are not what actually happened, they are stills of what we were feeling, thinking, and sensing in our bodies at that time. Memories themselves are not meant to be solely comforting, they can change, and that's how we learn. So much of what we know to be true comes from a place that is preverbal. The colors, compositions, and essence of my work attempts to guide back to that preverbal place.