Paracosm
I accumulate inspiration from urban landscapes and gothic architecture, blending observed places, personal objects, and religious abstractions to create paintings that play with reality and illusion, personifying the interpersonal and the supernatural. Recently, I came across the idea of “paracosm” in a book about mystical experience. The paracosm is a world built inside one’s imagination that is so vivid it becomes real. My own realities are challenged by reexamining past beliefs and it puts everything on the table. Painting is a way to deliberate on memories, mystical experience, questions of faith, illusion, and to search for a way to smoosh these together. The paintings are both an object and a window, a space beyond but pushing back. There’s a false perception of the surface, what’s illusion and what’s a real change in depth. These are all nuances inside my paracosm, as I’ve stepped to one side and another to re-examine what I believed to be true, many things fall flat. And where I once knew a barrier, I find an immense world open before me.
