I often describe my work in two words: unabashedly gay.

My practice moves between language and figuration, drawing from the humor, desire, intimacy, and contradictions of gay life. Since 2023, I have developed a body of text-based paintings that began through appropriating language from cheeky Grindr profiles. What started as a small experiment expanded into large-scale oil paintings in which gay language became a subject in itself. Featuring bold phrases rendered in emotive color, these works oscillate between comedy, confession, longing, vulgarity, and vulnerability.

The language in these paintings is distinctly gay-coded rather than shaped by convention. Some phrases are borrowed, while others emerge through conversation, social media, overheard remarks, or private thoughts that feel too strange, blunt, embarrassing, or honest to say aloud. I carry a notebook to collect these fragments as they occur, often choosing to make permanent in paint the lines that linger longest. Their meanings shift with context, drawing from shared experiences of gay life while resisting the need to fully explain themselves.

Alongside these text works, I have increasingly turned toward figurative work in painting and printmaking, creating images that range from sentimental to overtly sexual. These works place gay intimacy, in its many forms, at the forefront. Drawing upon art historical references, mythology, erotic imagery, and personal recollections, the figures inhabit moments of tenderness, lust, humor, fantasy, and emotional dependence. Whether through text or image, I am interested in what happens when gay experience is treated not as subtext, but as the main event.