Drawing in wonder, one line at a time

I work in dip pen, ink, and watercolor — close studies of the natural world that sit somewhere between botanical observation and invented mythology. Trees with bark that peels into something almost human. Branches that bend the way a body bends. A woodland that behaves, just slightly, like it's aware of you.

I came to this medium about three years ago, after spending more than twenty years working in fiber arts. That background still shapes how I think about a piece — the patience of it, the willingness to build something slowly, one mark or one stitch at a time. Ink turned out to be its own kind of thread. My process is quiet and repetitive by nature: stippling, hatching, layers of line that only resolve into a whole from a distance. I work in short, focused sessions, which has become less a constraint than a rhythm I trust.

My work centers on three ideas I return to again and again — awe, authenticity, and purpose. Awe, because the natural world still surprises me enough to draw it obsessively. Authenticity, because I'm more interested in what a tree feels like than what it photographs like. And purpose, because I want each piece to hold still long enough for someone to actually look at it.

I'm based in Western New York, where I'm a 2025 Roycrofters-at-Large Emerging Artist with close ties to the Roycroft Campus community in East Aurora — a place whose Arts and Crafts philosophy of honest, handmade work feels like a natural home for what I make. My current body of work, Sylvan Lyric, is a series of large-format pure ink tree drawings that will be shown at the Roycroft Fall Art Show this October.

Alongside this fine art practice, I run Fox Jot Studio, where I translate some of this same visual language — ink, watercolor, woodland, wonder — into illustration and stationery. But this space is about the work on its own terms: the drawings themselves, and where they might go next.