Present Moments in Time, a Solo Show, 2025

“Present Moments in Time” is a curated collection of my work ranging from 2019-2024. The name references the way the artistic process was and continues to be a meditation for me, bringing my total focus into the present moment and out of my head—thoughts, worries, future-thinking. This collection includes special pieces from different points in my artistic career, those pieces that I’ve kept over the years—some by choice or some because they didn’t sell—but that I’ve held on to because I believed in them. The show, produced by Cucuron, opens at The Rigs on April 12, 2025, from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., at 25 Walnut Street, New Orleans. The pieces in the collection are available here.

2019-2020

Two-thousand nineteen was the start of my career as a professional artist, although I’ve spent a lifetime creating and painting. I had been planning to pursue art as a career for a while, leaving my law practice in 2016—but we were surprised with twins in 2017. That began the hardest two years of my life, culminating in 2019, a year that I began to rebuild a stronger version of myself. Without going into too many details, 2017-2019 were all-consuming years focusing on the twins—the normal joy and exhaustion but also a relentless journey of medical issues, specialists, diagnoses, unanswered questions, and constant hypervigilance. That took a heavy toll, and by 2019, I was physically and mentally worn down. A therapist helped me begin to focus on my own interests and goals again, and I began to take steps for the art career I had been contemplating since college. So, 2019-2020 were years of development and constant experimentation in abstract expressionism.

The collection of collage vases I created during that time remain some of my favorite pieces I’ve ever made, with most of them kept in my private collection. They still feel very authentic to my style today, and the simplicity is something I return to again and again.  

2021-2022

In 2021 I began to work with my first gallery. I was having success at selling my collages during the Covid art boom years, and I released my collection “A Meditation.” I had been meditating habitually and learning management techniques for a lifetime of anxiety, which of course had peaked with kids, and learning how to accept the ultimate life truth that I actually have control of very little. Although I had a formal meditation practice, art was and is an even more natural form of meditation for me. Nothing else brings me into the moment, lets me forget everything else, and holds my focus like working out a composition. That led into the next era of my art—embracing the way my brain works constantly and using it to work out puzzle-like compositions, both digital and with collage. “The Story is Me” in 2022 was a collection I released that focused on my art being about me and my process—a reflection and celebration of the way my mind works—the good and the bad.

2023-2024

I continued to work with the artistic processes I had established. By 2021, I had returned to a part-time career in law which was very freeing creatively—I no longer felt the pressure to sell a certain amount of art which left room for more experimentation and enjoyment.  I never stick to just one process, but instead bounce back and forth between two different approaches. The first is planned simple compositions—those that I create either from digital sketches or plan out the whole collage before I begin glueing everything down. This means the problem-solving is finished before I start the actual art piece. The other process is more organic, collaging as I go without knowing the end result.

The twins are eight now. I have time to focus on them as well as myself. My studio time is just as meditative as it was when they were younger, although it feels more like an enjoyable portion of the day, rather than the necessary-for-survival process that it started out as in 2019. Art will always be a part of my life, and I’m looking forward to seeing how things develop over the next five years—how the art changes, but also how the common threads continue, like you can see with the pieces in this collection.