I've always been interested in how things feel.

Not just emotionally, but physically and energetically. How it feels to be fully ourselves. How our internal state changes what we experience and how much of what moves through us can be felt without ever being spoken.

Long before I had language for any of that, I was drawn to it through photography.

I spent more than a decade as a professional photographer, and the images I loved most were never simply the technically perfect ones. They were the ones where I caught something real. An emotion. A glimpse of someone's actual personality. The expression that appeared in the split second they stopped thinking about being photographed and simply became themselves.

Eventually, that fascination with emotion turned inward.

Caring about how I felt and wanting to feel good led me into a much deeper exploration of my own emotional world. I wanted to understand why we feel what we feel, what happens in the body when we're activated, why certain patterns repeat and how we can actually change our experience rather than simply understand it intellectually.

My own emotions, and the depth of emotion I encountered in the people I love, became some of my greatest teachers.

That curiosity eventually expanded into years of exploring nervous system regulation, embodied healing, energy, emotional awareness, beliefs and the unconscious patterns that influence our lives. I worked with clients individually and created courses and group experiences where I taught and explored many of those practices with others.

Somewhere along the way, Intentional Energy became the name for what I was really interested in underneath all of it: learning to recognize what we're actually bringing into an experience and developing the awareness and capacity to consciously work with it.

And then I found painting.

Or maybe painting found me.

What began with fluid art and energetic abstraction eventually became another way of exploring the same thing I'd been fascinated by all along.

Emotion.

Except now I could put it on a canvas.

Painting gives me somewhere to get what's active inside of me outside of me without having to understand it first. Subconscious messages, patterns, symbols and figures can emerge before I consciously know what they're about. I can respond to what appears, move it, feel it, understand it and create something new from it.

And increasingly, I'm interested in what a painting can make someone else feel too. Emotion has become part of what I'm looking for in the work itself, whether that's tenderness, power, pleasure, grief, mystery, beauty or something I don't have a name for yet.

Learning the craft

I've always had a tendency to go deeply into the things that interest me. I want to understand how they work, learn everything I can and explore them from as many angles as possible. There's definitely some perfectionism tangled up in that too.

Painting was no different. As my ideas became more complex, I wanted the technical ability to follow them wherever they were leading me. I pursued mastery of the craft because I don't want the limits of my technique to become the limits of my imagination.

I want to understand the rules so I can choose when to break them. I want to know the materials and techniques available to me so that when I can see or feel something in my imagination, I have the ability to translate it into a finished creation.

Now I'm bringing everything I've learned into my own portfolio, continuing to experiment, refine my voice and discover what's possible in the work I create next.

Where I am now

These days, Intentional Energy looks simpler than it once did.

I'm painting, creating original bodies of work, writing about the things I'm living and discovering and staying open to commissions, collaborations and ideas I haven't thought of yet.

I still care deeply about emotion, energy, embodiment, healing, relationships, pleasure, personal power and what it means to consciously participate in creating our lives.

None of those threads disappeared when I became more devoted to art.

They followed me into the paintings.