The First Universes, 2025, 16 x 20 x 1.25 inches unframed, 17.25 x 21.25 x 2 inches framed, acrylic, flashe, LDPE, oil pastel on canvas 

The First Universes comes framed in a natural wood frame and ready to hang.

The Story Behind the Work

The First Universes, named after a line from a Pablo Neruda poem, features textures built up from layers of monoprinting with plastic bags (LDPE), underneath a layer of tinted Burnt Sienna and ultimately oil pastel markings.

As Jennifer L. Roberts says in her six-part National Gallery of Art lecture series, printmaking is an intimate act of creation in which two foreign bodies rub up against each other with part of one of those bodies physically rubbing off onto the other.

I see this, the contact and release, the rubbing up and rubbing off, as a beautiful metaphor for our relationships, including our relationship with the natural environment. This is why I encorporate monoprinting in my paintings. We shape the environment through our fear and an urge to contain, control, ignore, damage, admire, revere, abuse, and preserve it, and it shapes us via the fragments of it we take with us in the forms of materials, photographs, sustenance, memories, ideologies, and beliefs.