"Kindergarten Teacher" Painting

I enjoy painting people and scenes in a universal way that captures common experience. I do this by combining emotional and experiential contexts through color, texture, and figurative elements. I try to convey joy, tension, confusion, thoughtfulness, loneliness, or tranquility through quiet scenes I see or by depicting meaningful moments I or my children have experienced. I paint primarily from life, my own original photographs, or imagination, so my work usually starts with realism but can venture into abstraction. Imagination and abstraction from the figurative often evolve as I am actually painting and like what I see happening in passages of paint and then go with it, continuing with color and expressionistic experimentation on the canvas simply because I think it is beautiful.