Everything I'm still holding...

I’m not someone who talks a lot. Most of the time, I try to let the work speak for me.

Painting has always been the place where my voice gets louder than it is in everyday life. When I’m in the studio, things that I normally keep quiet start showing up on the canvas. Hands gripping, bodies holding tension, figures caught somewhere between restraint and release. The work isn’t about resolution. It’s about the moment right before something changes. What We Hold, my solo exhibition at Tiburon Town Hall, grew from that space. The show centers on tension, containment, and the quiet weight carried through the body. Hands appear again and again throughout the work because they’re honest. Hands reveal pressure. They reveal responsibility. They reveal the things we hold onto, and sometimes the things we’re afraid to let go of.

One of the pieces in the show, Hand Grenade, is built entirely from interlocking human hands. At first glance it reads like a weapon. But the longer you look, the more it becomes something else entirely. It’s a reminder that the systems we fear, the violence we inherit, and the pressure we live under are things built by people. Held together by people.

I don’t usually make work that tries to explain itself. I trust the viewer to find their own meaning in the pause, in the posture, in the silence between gestures. But there are moments in the world that shake that silence. When you watch conflicts unfold, when war becomes the language of nations, when the news starts to feel like a countdown rather than a conversation, it forces you to confront the tension that already exists in the work. The fear that sits quietly in the background suddenly moves to the surface.

Moments like the current war with Iran don’t change the message of the paintings. They amplify it. Because the truth is, the work has always been about pressure. About the things we hold before they explode. About the fragile distance between restraint and release.

This exhibition is not about answers.

It’s about the pause.

The weight in our hands.

And the question of how long something can be held before it finally lets go.