My practice studying at UW has led me to intensify an already bright color palette and intentionally artificial materiality to capture and consume viewers’ attention. With striking aesthetics I strive to maintain the sacred goal of compelling an audience to linger and explore, giving my paintings more than a passing glance. I draw inspiration from late Byzantine mosaics, allegorical paintings from the Renaissance, and visionary artwork by Hilma af Klint. I aspire to create similar impacts of awe, rumination, and awakening through my colorful, playful, cartoon-like stylization. My current body of work seeks to connect humanity by telling a story where escapism, divination, and inter-dimensionality create a prophecy: Love, at the epicenter, is the protagonist who will save the universe. I use artificial, plastic looking color to contrast the divine, paying homage to the new gods that have emerged under the vindictive and compelling theocracy of capitalist and systemic structures within modern society. The delicious artificiality of acrylic paint, paired with my internal desire to create an all-inclusive, self-contained world where everyone can joyfully coexist, manifests itself into something that can become real and, therefore, is more than just a dream. Amidst real-world chaos, madness, and confusion, my ambition is to create beams of joy through my art to offset the mundane and operate as a catalyst to envision a brighter, kinder, loving, and, most of all, delightful future.