How do you grow and further challenge yourself as an artist?

Going to galleries and art shows, reading books about the subject matter I'm currently working on. I constantly challenge myself by being ambitious and by never being completely satisfied with my work. After finishing a piece, I can point out ten different ways I could do it better.  What a horrible feeling; I'm my own worst critic!

What inspires you?

People.  What's beneath their surfaces.  Their emotions and instincts, their fears and frustrations, and their strengths and weakness.

There is a strong confessional tone in your artwork. How therapeutic is the process of creating your lithography and other works on paper?

Because some of my works are personal journeys and experiences, I struggle a bit. But after the battle of what I should share and what I should leave out, it gets to the point where I release tons of my own condensed emotions and the artwork just flows.

After completing a piece of artwork, do you feel a more heightened sensation of the feelings you wished to visualize or a sense of calmof having expressed and committed them to paper?

After finishing a piece and accomplishing what I wanted to visualize, I usually get anxious thinking about what I should explore next.  I also feel an overwhelming need to do more artwork.  The result is always a sense of satisfaction for being true to myself and what I was committed to in the first place.

Texture, light and shadow, the use of positive and negative space and a monochromatic color palette are integral in your pieces.  You seem to have developed your own visual "language" in how these elements are used working in unison in a piece of artwork.  How did you arrive at these symbolic and very graphic elements and devices?

Although lithography is the perfect avenue to capture the mood of my work because of the high contrast between dark and light, the monochromatic color palette and the drawing technique are crucial for the harmony of my art.  I also use a drawing technique based on dry and liquid ink. Because of the different condsistencies of the ingredients, they resist each other.  The blending of ink creates a tangled confusion of rich texture ---  paths that represent the range of psychological and obscure emotions my artwork wants to communicate.