Two rooms. In one, a shrine room — flagstone floors cold underfoot, incense lit, spine lengthened, belly soft, attention gathered into stillness. In the other, a bedroom studio — brush moving across paper, yellows and oranges and grays finding each other, something coalescing that hadn't existed a moment before. I was a teenager moving between these two rooms, and without knowing it I was receiving the same teaching in both: that presence is a practice of noticing vitality. I grew up at the intersection of two rigorous disciplines — contemplative practice and classical painting — that shaped me simultaneously and have never been separate since. Raised within the Shambhala Buddhist community in Boulder, Colorado — founded by the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche — I was immersed from childhood in contemplative practices that treated perception itself as a discipline. Not religion in the conventional sense, but a rigorous, embodied training in how to see, how to be present, and how to encounter experience directly before the thinking mind interprets it. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty, while living inside that community, I trained in a classical atelier — grounding myself in the Italian tradition of drawing and painting at precisely the same moment I was deepening my contemplative practice. This places me in an unusual position in relation to Western art history. The dialogue between Eastern philosophy and Western modernism is well documented — in the Abstract Expressionists' engagement with Zen, in John Cage's use of silence, in the contemplative dimension of Mark Rothko's color fields. These artists were reaching, from within a Western tradition, toward something Eastern practice had been cultivating for centuries. I came to that territory from the other direction — trained first in the Eastern practice, then formed by classical Western visual discipline, and now working in the space where those two traditions genuinely meet. My paintings are figurative, but they are not primarily about the figure. They are about what the figure reveals — vulnerability, the permeable boundary between self and world, the way ordinary experience becomes luminous when you learn to pay attention to it fully. The human body in my work is not a subject so much as a site of inquiry. In the summer of 1999, not yet 21 years old, I had an experience at the Great Sand Dunes in the San Luis Valley that made all of this irreversible. Something cracked open that I could not close again. The need to confess, to expose rather than conceal, to be honest even when honesty is uncomfortable, became the organizing principle of my life and eventually of my painting. I make work for viewers who sense that there is more to see — in themselves, in the world, in the relationship between the two. My paintings are invitations to slow down, look carefully, and recognize something in the figures on the canvas that you already know about yourself but may not yet have words for. The bridge between East and West that I grew up straddling is ultimately a bridge between two ways of knowing — one that proceeds through analysis and craft, one that proceeds through presence and direct experience. My paintings try to stand on both sides at once.