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Oil on  panel, 2026.

A young girl, dressed in a nun’s habit, stands alone in the desert, and night is falling. The last golden rays of sunlight linger on her cheek. Nopal cactus surrounds her, framing her black robes; the full moon rises behind her head. Two bats swoop low toward her. The Little Nun is a painting about fear, but it’s not without hope. A child is ripped from home, abandoned to the wilderness, and darkness begins to creep in – what will happen to her? Two figures we associate with darkness and death are nearby – the bats – but this negative association is a cultural misunderstanding. San Antonio is home to the largest bat colony in the world, the Bracken Cave Preserve, and these creatures are important pollinators, as well as helping to control harmful bugs that damage crops and gardens. Additionally, though the sun has set, the moon is full, and its light is luminous enough to make one’s way. Though the little nun seems alone, there is help nearby from unexpected places, if she can learn the wisdom of the night.

Oil on panel, 2026.

A woman stands before a deep blue sky, directly facing the viewer. A brown bat swoops in front of her, its thin, leathery wing obscuring one of the woman’s eyes. She raises a gloved hand and peeking out beneath her glove is the gleaming tail of a dark scorpion, her skin raw and fiery beneath it. The sleeves of her dress evoke the body of an animal – covered in black and white fur and set with seven green and expressive cat’s eyes. In her other hand, she holds a Mahl stick. In the background, orange-leaved mesquite trees stretch their sloping and chaotic branches earthward, under the tiny winking eye of the waxing moon.

This painting arose from grief of the loss of my companion animal of 14 years, my cat Violet. As I looked ahead toward a life without her, all I knew for certain that would remain with me was the act of painting, so I hold my Mahl stick like a scepter. One of my north star painters is Leonor Fini, whose Self-Portrait with Scorpion is referenced here; the scorpion’s tail is the sting of grief. Violet’s eyes have embedded themselves into my sleeves, outfitting the arms with which I paint; before her death she would sit on my lap as I painted, watching the paintings unfold. Bats are one of the main motifs in my paintings, and for me, they are guardians, messengers, protectors, helpers, and psychopomps. In this painting, this bat is nearby as the subject integrates the pain of grief to begin making something new.

What the Moon has Witnessed. Oil on panel, completed 2026.

Oil on Panel, 2026

An androgynous figure emerges from a cluster of flame-shaped agave leaves, hands clasped in prayer. Above them, a chimeric creature descends: a heart-shaped cactus, with bat wings and a single piercing eye. The painting was inspired by two common scenes in religious art: depictions of the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends upon the Apostles of Christ, and the Anima Sola, which is a votive figure of a penitent soul surrounded by tongues of flame. In my art I like to mingle traditional scenes from the tradition of religious art with unexpected, mysterious elements, grounded in the native landscape from my home in South and Central Texas. Is the strange spirit or harbinger descending upon the figure holy?

Graphite on cold press paper, 2025

I create these chimeras – these creatures that are marriages of flora, fauna, and human body – to be like harbingers, ushering in unseen possibilities in an age of fracture and ecological collapse. Thus these chimeras are invitations to step into new and more powerful ways of being to meet this moment. The title is a reference to a favorite hymn from a childhood spent in church:

Let all mortal flesh keep silence and with fear and trembling stand;

Ponder nothing earthly-minded, for with blessing in his hand

Christ our God to earth descendeth, our full homage to demand.

The fleshy appearance of the smooth nopal cactus has always seemed appealing, but I know better than to touch it. 

Oil on panel, 2026.

A woman with golden skin wades chest-deep in dark water in the foreground, her fingers snaking through her long black hair. Behind her the last golden light slips behind the softly rolling shadowed hills. No moon hangs in the sky – instead, the sickle-shaped curve of a glowing rib bone floats above her.

The painting has many ancestors, including the tradition of the penitent Magdalene, a folkloric avatar of Jesus’ companion who has abandoned society to live out her days in the wilderness in mournful contemplation. I also returned to Leonor Fini’s Le Bout Du Monde (The End of the World), which depicts a woman partially submerged in dark water surrounded by bones and decaying plant matter beneath an apocalyptically red sky. 

My Magdalene-like subject is lost in reverie beneath the sudden appearance of a disembodied floating rib bone. To whom does the rib belong? How did it make its way into its moonlike position? Is she doomed to be simply another Eve, fashioned from such a bone, or does her separation from this lineage liberate her from narratives of subordination and oppression?

“The Liminal” situates flesh and bone, form and void, dark and light, offered up for the viewer to encounter all at once. This work is inspired by the long tradition of memento mori iconography, for inclusion in Space C7’s MementoMorium exhibition, on view October 2024.

My latest, “Home.” When home is hostile, beautiful but brutal.

My bittersweet love letter to my home state of Texas. The landscape of my life, the centuries-long open wound of colony from whence I came, the broken body of malign governance and treacherous climes. How bright the beauty, how sharp the knife.

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“The Gate (Anima Sola IV” is fourth in my series interpreting the figure of the Anima Sola, or Lonely Soul, in traditional Catholic devotional iconography. The Anima Sola is the soul trapped in the fires of purgatory, serene but captive and alone.

The Ecstasy of St. Joan. Completed July 15, 2022.

From the transcript of the trial of Jeanne D’Arc: “Jeanne replied she would not receive the Eucharist by changing her costume for a woman’s; she asked to hear Mass in her male attire, adding that it did not burden her soul.”

Bodily autonomy as Holy Edict. Freedom unyoked by God or State. Self-Divinity, whole, joyous,  and eternal.

Bodily autonomy has been weighing heavily on me (and on most women, trans, & queer people in the US). Joan has always been a figure of devotion for me. Most don’t know that she was executed as a relapsed heretic *because* she refused gender conformity. I paint Joan (or a Joan-like figure) free from God or State, in the power and joy of the fullness of their expression.

“Her judges gave her hope that she would be allowed to hear Mass if she would finally put off man’s dress and wear female attire, as befits her sex. She would not agree, and preferred not to take Communion and the holy offices, rather than abandon this [male] dress.”

“We questioned her to find out [why] she had resumed man’s dress and rejected woman’s clothes. Asked why she had resumed it, and who had compelled her to wear it, she answered that she had taken it of her own will, under no compulsion, as she preferred man’s to woman’s dress.

The charge: “The report has now become well known that this woman, utterly disregarding what is honourable in the female sex, breaking the bounds of modesty, and forgetting all female decency, has disgracefully put on the clothing of the male sex, a striking and vile monstrosity.”

One of her final words before her execution was this: “I was the angel, and there was no other.” This (though likely referring to her martial success for France) drew me into a beautiful possible world for Joan, where she could be her own Holy Angel.