Drawings

Metamorphosis, 2024

Various sizes, Alcohol Markers, Paint Pens, Mounting Squares on Marker and Black Paper

Metamorphosis is a series about stagnation and isolation, confinement, resilience, change, self actualization in the face of danger, and the strength therein. Created immediately after the 2024 election, Metamorphosis allowed me to engage and analyze the overwhelming and grief stricken feelings of being a queer person living under the newly reappointed Trump administration and turn it into something beautiful and meaningful. This work is akin to an abstracted self portrait, depicting my own feelings and thoughts of queerness and resilience through the motifs of snakes, butterflies, and roses. These figures are confined to their own frames and shadow boxes portraying the claustrophobia of being pinned for others to gawk at and judge. Yet the monarchs outside their frames, bringing with them their orange and gold colors, serve as the resistance. A reminder that the butterflies will break from their cadges, snakes are able to protect themselves and those they love, and the rose's beauty is both actualized and immortalized in all its forms, from bud to bloom to decay.

A History of Queer Flowers, Literature,

and Love, 2023

18" x 24", Graphite, Alcohol Markers and Metallic Paint Pens on Paper

Alternate Title: We Have Always Been Here

A History of Queer Flowers, Literature, and Love is an illustration depicting historical allusions of queerness and the importance of what acknowledging their existence means. Through books such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and Giovanni's Room (stories of gay men), A General History of Pirates and the Poems of Sappho (tales of lesbian love), and Dracula (Jonathan Harker is bisexual and no one can tell me otherwise) combined with classical LGBTQ+ associated flowers such as Roses (romantic love), Lavender (general queerness), Violets (lesbianism), a Pansy (a slur for gay men), and Green Carnations (popularized by Oscar Wilde to subtly portray homosexuality) paint a portrait of both community and resilience in the face of adversity.

Its alternate title, We Have Always Been Here, illustrates the core meaning of the work, laid bare. In looking back to queer history and how gay, lesbian, and bisexual people of the past told their truth in covert ways, it proves that queer people have always existed and will always exist.

Life Blood, 2023

18" x 24", Graphite on White and Black Paper

Lifeblood is an illustration of my own feelings about connection, legacy, and familial expectations. Portrayed as if it was a Victorian scientific diagram, the rose my great-grandfather invented that lives in a tree outside my home is deconstructed and illustrated in all its forms. The main illustration, the Life Blood, is a portrayal of my own hand, fingertips blackened, fingers severed, and the rose itself growing from my blood. Representing how both the rose blooms from by bloodline itself, but it also takes everything from me, strangling with is thorns to grow higher despite my own suffering.

Woman in Picture, 2024

36" x 48", Alcohol Markers and Colored Pencils on Paper

A faint green glow seems to emanate from the eyes of an old painting down the dimly lit hall. The sickly green gaze seems transfixed on you as you approach, the smirk of her lips growing before your eyes. You dare not stare too long at the woman in the picture, lest she truly choose to come to life.

Various Sizes, Paint Pens and Alcohol Markers on Shrink Plastic and Card stock, Hot Glue, Mounting Squares, Packing Paper, Cardboard and Masking Tape