I grew up in a small Arkansas town with parents who fixed, saved, and made. That early attention to materials still guides my studio. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I learned to refine rather than embellish. My work begins in ordinary scenes—piers, sheds, overpasses, signs, and the people who move around them. I strip them down to a few values and clear shapes, letting structure hold the feeling. Printmaking keeps my hand honest; painting brings the air and the pause. I’m drawn to edges: where land meets water, where a sodium streetlight meets fir branches, where a family snapshot meets a public place. These are not documents of a region so much as exercises in attention—ways of giving weight to the lived infrastructure that carries us. I aim for quiet: the kind that comes when a composition finally balances and an ordinary thing can be seen fully.