The Fire Keepers

In ancient civilizations, it was often women—especially elderly women—who served as the fire keepers. They were more than tenders of flame; they were cultural figures who embodied the transformative power of fire. As guardians of warmth, memory, and wisdom, they held space for community, continuity, and change. This exhibition reclaims that reverence. It insists that aging is not retreat, but expansion. Not decline, but revolution. With each passing year, we grow deeper into our power. With every line, we become more beautiful.

The Fire Keepers is a visual ode to the sacred strength and enduring beauty of women—women who wear their age not as a burden, but as a badge of radical evolution. In a culture obsessed with youth and denial, these portraits stand in defiance. They are declarations. They are testaments. Acrylic brush to canvas becomes memory to muscle—telling stories of lives lived boldly and resiliently. Each woman portrayed carries the marks of time: lines etched by laughter and loss, softness shaped by battles fought and boundaries drawn. This work is not about turning back the clock or freezing time. It is about moving forward—eyes wide open, spirits unyielding. To walk forward with strength, we must walk toward their wisdom. To shape the future, we must honor their presence.

Beauty is aging. Power is aging.
Let’s make wisdom powerful.
Let’s make aging visible.
Let’s honor their fire.

I am a visual artist living and working in Philadelphia. I work mainly in acrylics but increasingly incorporate mixed media and three-dimensional elements into my pieces. I am fascinated by patterns, and how they ripple, radiate, refract, bloom, interact, and cluster. My works allude to aerial views, cartography, architectural renderings, musical notation, urban-like densities, and other natural and man-made patterns.

My process mirrors that of my songwriting and music arranging, involving the repetition of a small selection of formal elements, subtle variation, the timbre of the color palate, rhythm, and randomization strategies.

More recent abstract geometric pieces, including painted sculptures, explore themes of nostalgia, anxiety, climate change, play, musicality, fragility, physical and psychic fragmentation, and allusions to impenetrable data, all reflective of, and perhaps counter to, accelerating planetary chaos.

I paint to give form to the unseen forces that shape how we live.

I grew up in New York City, and I have spent nearly a decade practicing law. That background is not incidental to my work. It is the work. I understand from the inside how legal systems, urban infrastructure, and institutional power operate on people’s lives, and I make paintings about what that actually feels like.
I work in mixed media on large-format cotton canvas. Oil, acrylic, charcoal, ink, pastel, paper, and plaster build up in layers across the surface. Beneath most works are pages from case law textbooks, legal notepads, receipt paper, and sticky notes. These materials are not decorative. They are evidence.

My collection, Urban Cartographies (2024 to present), maps the experience of moving through a city that depends on people while rarely accounting for them. Figures emerge outlined but unfilled. Lines trace pathways, detours, and fractures. I let texture and gesture carry the emotional weight that stems from my everyday life as an attorney and childhood experiences.

I am currently exploring abstract portraiture. Faces repeat, distort, and fragment as a direct rejection of systems that reduce people to categories.

A collection of work responds to the current political climate. As a painter and an attorney watching the structures I have studied come apart in real time, I have no interest in staying quiet. My anger is not a liability. It is where the work starts.

I work from my studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Works are placed privately with collectors. Studio viewings are by appointment.

I am a magical realism painter with a focus on figures, hybrids, whimsical, and the metaphysical. Life as it is and life as imagined. I explore dreams, meditations, and the cosmos. My studio, I have come to understand, is a work in progress, sort of like a provocative daydream. I seek to discover the soul and spirit of what I am engaged with, making visual narratives about life in the now moment. In my work as a channel/healer, I often experience people in the most intense times of their lives, both in pain and joy. I have learned to draw upon this, creating narratives reflecting personal growth in my paintings. I am interested in the complexity of mysticism, spirituality, healing, and otherworldly explorations. I share stories about my personal life experiences, which can remind me that my work is a visual diary. I am inspired by Guillermo Lorca, Odd Nerdrum, and John William Waterhouse, who seek to tell stories within their art. And finally, I am forever inspired by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot.

Rather than subscribe to a particular icon, subject, ideology, or style, I prefer not to be limited. I start with large brushes, allowing for a free-form “gliding” over the canvas. In that way, it’s easy to feel that my process is like an open-eye meditation. I point my brush in the direction to capture the essence, the soul of my subjects. Perhaps to give the viewer a sense of connection, a sense of timelessness, to enter the art and be part of it. I like to think of what I do as outrageous, spontaneous play with the Unseen, to make the Seen. I am in constant dialogue with the muse to discover what’s next, to listen. In that way, my work feels less controlled.

In my work as a healer, I work with clients in a myriad of ways with the idea of shifting energy. These energies are the ones that are no longer in operation, per se, but are still being carried around. In this body of work, my focus was to create and paint much like a visual diary. We are all ready at some time to Move On. The paintings start small, with each shift of energy, the color palette changes, as does the canvas size. I chose to work with the idea of a house as represented in this series as what we are intimate with. In painting #1, we see a female who is trapped and or has outgrown the current situation. In painting #2, the figure has moved out of the given situation, but her eyes are closed. In painting #3, we see a sense of Spirit acting as Guide with movement taking place, a willingness to leave the former reality. In painting #4, first feelings and sensations of growing, healing, self-love, and passion returning to the self. In painting #5, this is where the transformation now begins. Darker energies transform into colors; the heart chakra is shown on the main figure with the idea of pink and green, as this is the healer now working with inner selves. In painting #6, moving towards freedom, she has her hand on the house; she’s got a handle on it. In painting #7, she feels lifted by love, and in the last painting, she is now on top of it all. Total freedom and connection with the Light. I have named this series Movin’ On.

The theme of my artwork is: Bring Nature into your Home. My paintings reflect some aspects of nature. I paint in an impressionistic style. I like to use bold colors that sometimes become more important than the subject matter. I like to create work that has fewer details.

I would like viewers to use their imagination to draw their own conclusions about what the painting means to them. My goal when someone views my paintings, is to simulate awareness of how nature enriches our lives.

When I paint, I feel as though I’m unraveling the threads of emotions that words cannot reach. The canvas becomes a space where memory, vulnerability, and resilience come to life. I don’t strive to control the work; instead, I let the textures and colors guide me, allowing the painting to take on its own voice.

Each brushstroke feels like a dialogue—a quiet conversation with the cracks and crevices of human experience. I layer paint to echo the layers of our stories: fragmented, raw, and imperfectly beautiful. The act of painting is not just a process but a meditation, a way to confront and celebrate the moments that define us.

The narratives in my work are deeply personal yet universal. They invite viewers to step closer, to see themselves in the fractures and textures. Art, for me, is a way of repairing and connecting—a reminder that even in our most fragile moments, there is strength and beauty to be found.

As a photographer, I am constantly in search of iconic imagery. The craftsmanship and perfection of classic Hollywood cinema have always been an inspiration and goal I seek to achieve in my photography. While enjoying the technology of the present and how that has enhanced photography, I am very drawn to recreate photographs that reference the best of the past. It is my intent that the viewer of the images I create will be taken out of the everyday present to a magical place where at anytime they would dream of going. Whether photographing people or nature, I strive to honor the best and beauty of all that I have an opportunity to capture with my camera.

Summer days are the dream moments of the year that are looked forward to in dreary seasons. The beach, pool, lakes, and oceans draw all to embrace the sun and beat the heat. When we think of summer, we embrace all that the warmth of the sun brings.

The path of my life as an artist was set with my first show. I was working on my master of Fine Arts from George Washington University. Since I was not required to attend classes in my final year but only to paint and write my master’s thesis, I decided to move to the south of France to a region where so many of my favorite artists had been inspired. I was painting in a village in Provence when someone stopped to look at my painting and asked me if I wanted to have a show in Monaco. It was my first show, and when it was successful, I decided that was what I wanted to do: travel, paint the people and places I saw, and figure out how to sell those paintings to earn enough for the next trip.

My travels became more and more exotic, starting in the Mediterranean and taking me to over 50 countries in Europe, Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. When I landed in the Sahara and met the nomads, I felt I had found a second home. Raised on a cattle ranch, I felt an affinity for the nomadic herders and lived and migrated with them for part of each year for 25 years.

On my second trip to the Sahara, I had been invited to travel with a rebel leader of the Tuareg insurgency. In the days before satellite phones and the internet, he wanted me to tell their story. Not knowing how, I said I would try.  This promise would color the rest of my life. I opened Nomad Gallery, which for 25 years showed the paintings of my travels and art forms I imported from the places I visited. As I came to understand the nomads’ culture, I became an expert advising ambassadors in an area considered too dangerous for them to visit and leading film crews and tourists.  Recognizing the poverty they lived in, I founded The Nomad Foundation to help my nomadic friends better their lives and preserve their traditions. My life as an artist had taken an unexpected turn. My curiosity and love of telling stories through my paintings led me to humanitarian work, which made a difference in the lives of thousands of nomads.

My artistic goal has always been to help my viewers understand and appreciate the people and places my travels take me, be it to Niger, Mongolia, India, or Indiana.

I intend these pictures as mythological footprints of conflicting values in our times. Present-day worship of the human body, the perfect physique – and its tangent to an ancient Greek concept, physical perfection as a mirror for spiritual perfection – is expressed here by the contrast of modern, live figures arrested in a moment of interaction with archetypal forms.

In Christianized Western civilization, depictions of naked male flesh have been closely associated with evil that the only way a nude male body could be tolerated as if it was being abused, punished, or mutilated – a sort of sadomasochistic expiation of unconscious guilt about merely having a body, whereas depictions of female nudity are culturally acceptable according to John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” because they provide opportunities for “acceptable” male possession whether in fact or desire.

My goal is to challenge contempt for the fully nude male figure, which is thought to be, at best, embarrassing and, at worst, indecent. My exploration involves placing homoerotic male nudes in intimate domestic locations, which engage the viewer either as voyeur or partner. The work is meant to challenge the viewer to examine their values and prejudices vis-a-vis intimacy and the nude male. My intent is to invite the viewer to confront their own beliefs and values about the naked body and to resolve for themselves the question of good and evil regarding nudity in general, and male nudity in particular, as well as provide a peacefully sensual way of drawing the viewer into a space that challenges heteronormative assumptions of male competition, and which demonstrates that same-sex relationships are wholesome, healthy and life-affirming.