I learned how to see through the places that raised me.

Park Slope. Harlem. Hell’s Kitchen. Sunset Park. Downtown Brooklyn.

The train lines between them.

I remember apartment windows, schoolyards, bodegas, construction sites, scratched-up basketball courts, and the feeling that every block carried its own personality.

Some of those places don’t exist anymore.

I paint because memory changes faster than buildings disappear.

Many of my paintings begin with a specific moment rather than an idea: a kickball game at my elementary school, someone standing under fluorescent smoke shop lights, walking home after a night of bad decisions, a face seen on the train that stays with me longer than it should. I don’t try to recreate these moments exactly. They break apart as I paint, mixing with imagination until they become something between remembrance and invention.

I often work on found wood and discarded surfaces collected around the city. They already carry dents, stains, nail holes and markings. These surfaces arrive with a life before mine, allowing the painting to become a collaboration between memory and material.

Faces return again and again. So do windows, fragments of text, outlines of high-rises seen from rooftops I wasn’t supposed to be on, and the ordinary architecture of neiborhoods before they became something else. New York isn’t just where I’m from; it’s the language my paintings speak.

My work isn’t about documenting the city as it is. It’s about preserving what it felt like to move through it before those memories disappear completely. As my life carries me to new places, those places become part of my work as well. Each painting becomes another attempt to hold onto a moment before it slips away.