My work is situated at the boundary between word and image: paintings evoke stories, symbols can be interpreted like texts. My sketchbooks are filled with words—a single word that strikes me, a short phrase that resonates like a mantra—and images often grow from those. Vessel; oviform; alkonost; mandorla: naming something gives it shape. This symbiosis between word and image is a result of my academic background in literature. When I began painting, I brought a literary way of looking at the world: reading, connecting, synthesizing, finding connections, parsing meaning, identifying patterns, refining theses. Images—not words—are now my primary tools of expression, but when I paint I begin, as I do when I write, with primary sources. I research Byzantine iconography, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, old Russian folklore illustrations, amulet chests in Thailand, stone reliefs telling an epic tale around the Angkor Wat palace in Cambodia. I identify patterns—birds, eggs, almond-shapes—and slowly pull bits and pieces from across geographies and eras to create my own visual language, a composite of many cultural vocabularies. I layer fragments of art history, plucked from their domain—the Egyptian cartouche, the elongated Byzantine face, the round niches for amulets from Thailand—and combine them with personal stories, explorations of my identity, and elements from the Louisiana landscape where I grew up. The result is a personal visual language, fragments of myself embedded in the intertwined narratives of art history.