There is always a place for me to begin. Sometimes it’s a page from a magazine, or a postcard from my grandmother’s travel collection, a piece of painted paper, or a small, unfinished collage that feels like it can grow. I build color stories—pulling from my sketchbooks, piles of papers, photographs, solid colors, painted and printed-on papers. Then I think about form as I put the papers down next to each other, finding colors and lines that connect. My facility with white space come from my training in Japanese brush painting; what I know about composition and building curves comes from looking closely at and endlessly repeating the shape of tree branches, the bend of grasses, the contours of rocks. Sometimes I paint and draw over the papers, editing with white paint and matching colors with gouache; sometimes the papers, cut and glued, are enough as they are. 

Each of these small color study artworks is an original analog collage made up of painted and found paper, framed and signed.

Artwork dimensions: Heartbeat 1 & 2, 7 × 5