Light Path: Refractions

August 5th - August 28th, 2026

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My work usually starts outside the studio, when I’m traveling or on local walks. I often contemplate time spent in Los Angeles and the surrounding desert, or with family in Oregon. These paintings are a combination of images I photographed over the last few years. Each painting is considered from multiple images, my memories, imagination – or something pulling at my heart. I’m finding a need for storytelling, working with internal reflections of my experiences matching my finished paintings. Working in egg tempera, a mixture of egg yolk, dry pigment, and water, I build multiple layers for each color.

 

For this series, Light Path: Refractions, I was first excited by “Sunstars,” where spiky beams of light radiated from the sun in photographs I took, then to small orbs, or “Ghosting,” all from the camera lens creating lens flares. I found myself drawn to moments where light shifts or bends. In very simple terms, “Refraction” is the bending of light as it passes from one transparent medium to another, which makes the light change speed, and the light can split into a spectrum of colors. A camera lens can create lens flare, while a rainbow is created by light refracting through atmospheric water droplets. While revisiting older photographs I had taken, I realized that rainbows appeared in many of them. I was hesitant to paint them at first, as I was trying to understand why I was so drawn to them. Then my grandmother passed away, and I saw the most magnificent rainbow the next day. I felt like it was a message from her to enjoy this gift of painting, and I leapt into painting rainbows as well.