I graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in May of 2016 and subsequently moved to Philadelphia to set up a painting studio and try at being a working painter. One of the hardest parts about painting, without a patron or a school for support, is the prohibitive costs of materials. In order to have a robust and productive studio practice, one must be constantly working, without needing to think about such costs. The Resource Exchange allows me the opportunity to buy inexpensive canvases, or other painting surfaces, on which I can experiment and liven up my painting practice.

My paintings are constantly fighting between what I want and what I don’t want. I felt that what I wanted out of a painting was intuitive. I should come to it through doing rather than thinking, but it is very easy to think about what I don’t want a painting to be. It is all good and well to want a painting to be original and fresh, to stand out in a crowd, but operating within the lens of conformity, I think, allows for more room to grow. By holding on to a specific set of ideals with clear boundaries I am able to make aesthetic decisions I never could have dreamed of on my own. But this begs the question, conformity to what? Within my painting practice it is the adherence to an investigation into the aesthetics of a digitally designed world made real. Incredible forms are being drawn in AutoCAD, and built in places like Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Orlando. When I view them through the filter of Google Maps, they become the Nazca Lines of a new age. These forms cannot be seen at the human level. When you are on a golf course or at a water park, you cannot understand how painterly the gestures of these spaces are. But much like painting there are trends, there are similarities, there are certain boundaries that confine the aesthetics of these spaces.