"I began painting my Dance of Life series in 2008, inspired by doing sidewalk chalk drawings of flowers with children and taking a trip to visit my grandmother and sister in the Sonoran Desert. My artistic loves highlight nature’s gems: bright color, texture, and transparency. A small bite of the yawning & vast natural world. My love for transparency and the exotic and rare brought me more and more into the underwater world. There is so much magic under the sea and I love capturing it; really taking a close look and allowing us all to marvel at what swims beneath the surface.In Jelly Undulations and Seadragon’s Surprise, I’m combining photos and creating my own underwater world. With Seadragon’s Surprise I decided to make the subjects slightly surreal, and added a flower into that underwater world for the seadragon to look at. I took that a step farther in Tulip & Jellyfish Embrace, emphasizing the relationship between the jellyfish and the flower, and starting to explore adding molding paste in the base. There are at least 50 texture paintings in between these two paintings as I grew and explored that molding paste base as a medium, and at least another 100 paintings exploring resin before I envisioned Jellyfish Rising.My most recent Grace series is a culmination of working with these different media separately over the past 15 years. I layer molding paste, then oil paint, and on some pieces such as Jellyfish Rising, I layer resin on parts of the painting before finishing with hyper-realistic oil painting on the surface. I largely paint on panel. I use thin layers and dry brushes at times to keep the color sharp and the edges crisp. Jellyfish Rising and all the Grace series explores water in many forms through texture & transparency: the way waves look when seen from a plane, watching the bank of a river or a cresting wave in the sea, and the wave’s tiny droplets. I apply the paste with a large palette knife, then remove some by using a pull up motion to create this wavy texture. The tentacles of the jellyfish were applied with a small liner brush. This piece overall took 140 hours to complete over the course of a year."