I am a Vancouver-based painter whose recent work explores the intersection of the human form and the natural world. As I've grown older, and my work has changed, it's become an interesting mirror of the things I value most.

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I've always been drawn to what one might consider 'typically' beautiful, which hasn't necessarily been an easy path. As a young gay child growing up in northern Alberta, my inclination towards beauty wasn't exactly celebrated. The traditional 'boy' things never interested me as much as my grandmothers' flower beds did. I traded my place on the hockey team for sewing classes, and as you can imagine, no one at the time knew quite what to do with me.

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I assumed all this would change when at 19 I moved to the big city of Calgary to go to the Alberta College of Art and Design (now the Alberta University of the Arts). I was finding my place in the world as a gay man, and my inclination towards beauty remained. Ironically, this was challenged in art school as I navigated teachers and peers pressuring me with questions of why. Why does beauty matter? How is this work moving the dial? Are you a real artist if you're not pushing the status quo?

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Struggling with my sexuality, I finally relented and leaned into something that 'mattered'. I made art about being gay, through beauty, but also through some subversive subject matter, and began to feel like I was actually moving the dial. What I didn't expect was that leaning into those uncomfortable places artistically also allowed me to blossom, and evolve as a young man.

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All these years later I still struggle with the 'why'. Why flowers? Why trees? Why these faces? Does any of it matter? Am I leaning in? I'm not completely sure what the answer is, but what I will say is that it feels right. If it's simply a reflection of my life at present, then so be it. There is vulnerability in the beauty, in the faces, and the flowers, and the clouds. There's hope, resilience and intuition. There's a cycle of love and loss and rebirth, both of the garden, and of the soul.

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I hope that this work finds you the way it found me, and that it may bring you back to your center, in the way it brought me to mine.