Between Stillness & Flight

Between Stillness and Flight: Portraits of a Whitetail Herd is an ongoing series inspired by the deer that live in the woods surrounding our Arkansas home. Through months of watching the herd, I’ve come to know them not simply as wildlife, but as individuals, each with distinct relationships, behaviors and personalities. Their lives move constantly between beauty and hardship, tenderness and hierarchy, quiet presence and sudden flight. These paintings combine recognizable portraiture with my abstract language of layered color, veils, loose marks and lines that disappear and re-emerge. At the heart of each is the animal’s gaze, the place where I find their individuality most powerfully, and a reminder to be completely present in the brief moment before they disappear back into the woods.