Artist Statement

In the series A Drop in the Ocean, my large abstract paintings explore memory, presence, and loss.

A Drop in the Ocean began while I was caring for my husband. A brilliant and funny former comparative literature academic, he died of an aggressive form of bladder cancer in 2025. His final incomprehensible scribbles, made during home hospice, became my visual source material.

I began the series with intuitive, gestural acrylic on raw canvas, with compositions that form and dissolve in continuous motion. Subsequent paintings incorporate medical language—wound, stoma, chemo, late—transcribed onto canvas laid across my studio floor in wax pastel.

Hours before he died, we watched The White Lotus. In the show, death is described as a drop of water rejoining the whole. After his death, the series evolved with luminous, oceanic fields layered with oil, wax pastel, and pigment stick. Chalkboard-like marks and erasures evoke his life as an academic. By reworking the surface, I let marks and gestures overlap and reappear, fading in and out of memory.

The paintings capture the state of beginning and ending, excavating what emerges from devastation.