In music, dissonance is the clash between two sound waves; in life, dissonance is a clash between two ideas. Harmony, on the other hand, is an agreement between wavelengths. Dissonance embodies conflict and drives the tension in music, the desire to hear the resolution. In a state of personal dissonance, I found myself at the edge of my boundaries, ready to jump off hoping to find some unknown harmony. 

In 2007 I had my first love, playing trumpet, abused by a music professor. I would tremble whenever he was around. My passion for music was destroyed. As an outlet, I turned to painting, but my expression was sedated. I doubted everything I created. For the next five years, I sabotaged my art. Stuck between dissonant ideas, I bounded between my love of art and the complusion to destroy it before anyone else could. 

With every ricochet, I drove closer to the edge of my fear. I found myself at the edge of a metaphoric cliff. I could turn around to lose art forever, or I could take a leap, facing my fear to pursue art with everything I had. I jumped. 

Two weeks and eight plane rides later, I found myself in a shack in the middle of the jungle. I had been invited to teach painting in Belize. This jungle harmonized me into a parallel universe. The moment I put my brush to canvas again, I cried. I had resurrected my passion. The jungle became an environment that was able to charge this new freedom. As Werner Herzog described the jungle, “there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder.” The untamed nature allowed me to tune into my passion again. That experience is what set the foundation for my art. 

My paintings become a place where I embrace dissonance and explore the unknown. It is the cliff at the edge of where logic and language fall apart into pure experience. Paint becomes my literal thought--thought that doesn’t involve words. It is an inner-communication where I connect with the ecologies of who I am. I become place and space. With painting I get to return to the jungle, to tune into my own nature. I get to face my fears and uncertainties, hold contradiction, explore the fringes of who I am, and whether harmonic or dissonant, I get to investigate the things that I have no explanation for. 

During times when the world generates so much dissonance, we need the thought-spaces that art secures. My paintings provide a language to think and communicate beyond prose. They are a tool to identify how we feel both somatically and emotionally. They offer experiences to validate the ineffable, and launch us into a space where we can process our uncertainty. They can be a way to find harmony, and in times when we have no words, we have art.