Artist Statement

Water is my subject, but time is my medium. A wave exists for an instant; the painting of it takes months. In the gap between the photograph’s fraction of a second and the slow accumulation of thin, blended layers of oil, I look for what the eye cannot hold: the architecture of a breaking crest, light moving across the surface, the shifting colour of depth.

The sea has been my constant since childhood, from the shores of Georgian Bay to the coast of Salento. I paint it in all its states (still, turbulent, luminous) because its mutability mirrors our own: the ebb and flow of the tides as a measure of human life. In a body of self-portraits I have entered the water myself, exploring the bond between water and the feminine: its strength, its fragility, its power to heal.

I paint in oil on aluminum, wood panel and canvas, so that the brushstroke recedes and the image seems to hold its own light. The realism is not an end in itself. It is an invitation to slow looking, a counterweight to an image culture that moves too fast. At its core, the work is an act of reverence: for water as the source of life, and for the attention it takes to protect it.