LOVE TRIPPIN'
2026
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Featured
Images of the garden and gallery installation
Imagine you’re in love.
Not the polite version. The kind where everything feels slightly heightened. Colors are louder. Ordinary things become more important. You notice the tiny details you would normally walk past. Something brushes against you and suddenly you can feel it everywhere. The back of your head tingles. Everything is familiar, but somehow a little different.
Now visualize that feeling growing in a garden.
“Love Trippin” started with a comment someone made about a body of botanical paintings I showed in 2022: “It feels like a romantic acid trip.” I loved the description, but more than anything, it left me with a question: what does a romantic acid trip actually look like to me?
I started thinking about the feelings and sensations I remembered from my own experiences. Colors becoming almost impossibly vivid. The strange awareness of your own body. The back of your head tingling. Getting completely lost in one tiny detail. Things moving when they aren’t moving. Moments of total euphoria followed by an incredible calm. Everything familiar suddenly feeling new again. And the more I thought about it, the more it started to sound a little like being in love.
Around the same time, my fiancé had taken over a community garden plot. Flowers started making their way into our home and eventually into my work. The chrysanthemums, dahlias, and other botanicals throughout this show come from that little world. Things he has grown for me, things our neighbors have grown beside us, flowers I’ve watched appear, disappear, and come back again.
Suddenly I had my subject.
Someone I love was growing flowers, and I was trying to figure out how to paint what love feels like.
I didn’t want to paint love as something precious or perfectly composed. I wanted it to feel the way love actually feels to me: overwhelming, funny, tender, obsessive, comforting, occasionally ridiculous, and a little intoxicating.
That’s where the trip begins. Flowers multiply. They dance. They drip. They get tied up in ribbons. They sparkle. Smiley faces appear where they probably shouldn’t. Glitter sits beside careful painting, spray and splatter interrupt quieter moments, and familiar flowers slowly become something different.
The materials and techniques shift throughout the work intentionally. Some paintings are quiet and observational; others become increasingly saturated, layered, reflective, repetitive, and distorted. I wanted the show to move through sensations rather than follow a straight line. That strange progression of being completely present one second and somewhere else entirely the next. Your body buzzing. Your thoughts wandering. One detail suddenly becoming the most fascinating thing you’ve ever seen.
And somewhere underneath all of it is something very ordinary: someone I love planted flowers.
I painted what that felt like.
