I use the stories I created during my childhood in Brazil as the inspiration for my paintings.  The organic shapes come from my early contact with nature, exploring a garden full of flowers with different shapes and colors from my aunt's backyard. This early experience ignited different emotions and a curiosity for colors and texture.

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I also had a sense of impeding doom and need for survival. What kept me going was the belief that if I resisted pain and prevailed, I could transform my darkness into a garden like my aunt's.

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I combine my imagined stories and my belief in transformation to develop my paintings. Beginning with a random collections of collage papers, photos, discarded sketches, parts of a song's lyric and expressive mark making I develop layers of visual and physical texture that react to each in other to tell a story.

The final painting is an act of experimentation and patience that, being resilient enough, will slowly be transformed into something that brings joy.