MY JOURNEY

The story behind every canvas

This isn't a story about a painting hanging on a wall. It's about what it took to still be a
person who could hang one — and why I chose to spend that fight on art.

This isn't a story about a painting hanging on a wall. It's about what it took to still be a
person who could hang one - and why I chose to spend that fight on art.

BEFORE

The life I was building

Before the accident, I was competing at a high level, pushing my body every day, and I thought I knew exactly what my life was going to look like. I had no reason to think otherwise. That's the thing about the life you're building — you don't know which day is going to be the last normal one.

THE ACCIDENT

The day everything changed

The accident cost me more than I can fit into a single sentence: a leg, amputated. An arm, paralyzed. A traumatic brain injury that scrambled the wiring I used to take for granted. What followed wasn't a recovery story with a clean finish line — it was eight years of chronic pain, relearning how to do things a body is supposed to just know how to do.

FINDING THE CANVAS

Painting with what I had left

I didn't come to painting because it was easy — I came to it because it was one of the only things left that I could still do on my own terms. I use the limbs I have left to hurl, strike, and gouge paint onto the canvas, working around the pathways the injury took from me instead of waiting for them to come back. Franz Kline and the New York Abstract Expressionists showed me that a mark doesn't have to be careful to be honest.

| "I am still here. I am still creating. I still exist."

WHAT THE COLORS MEAN

Chaos of Reality

Every piece in this series carries the same language. The black structures are the trauma — blunt, heavy, impossible to paint around. The reds, crimsons, and magentas are the hope I kept choosing anyway. I'm not asking you to see my accident in these paintings. I'm asking you to see what it looks like to keep going after one.

WHY I SHARE THIS

If you're in your own eight years

I put this story next to my work on purpose. If you or someone you love is living with a disability, chronic pain, or a setback that took away the life you had planned — I want you to know someone kept creating anyway, one-handed, on the days it would have been easier not to. If a piece of that finds a wall in your home, it's not just art hanging there. It's a reminder that you're still here too.