When I’m away from the studio, it feels like I’m a fish out of water. It’s just a beautiful place for me to be alone and concentrate.

I live and work in the Mission, and I have for 17, going on 18 years now. I really enjoy the time when it’s just silent and it’s just me.

I think that’s pretty good. I find inspiration when I’m out living my life or in my studio. I might daydream about a moment that I had where I was trying to live in the present. I’ll kind of think about what I was experiencing and how it made me feel, but then also let the painting speak to me. I used to play soccer, so I think, I like to think of this one is like truly my childhood self-portrait.

Me playing sports in the park. I was always interested in art from a young age. It felt kind of natural to go into arts, and I always wanted to be creative. I moved to the Bay Area to go to CCA for printmaking. The Bay Area represented this time in my life of independence, of being creative, of being young.

This is like a record of all of the stuff that I have that I printed when I was younger. When I first graduated from CCA, I was kind of trying to figure out who I was as an artist, and I really loved screen printing, so I was still doing screen printing at the time. This one was inspired by people doing tai chi.

So we call it “kitchen tai chi,” which is kind of like a joke, but it’s like, my dad would kind of make up any sort of move and do “tai chi,” but I don’t really think it was real tai chi. When I graduated from school, from CCA, I had work immediately. I always continued to make art throughout working full time and working multiple jobs.

It was pretty hard for me to actually have access to a printmaking studio. I started drawing and painting in my house as like a home studio. When I got my first studio outside of my home, I painted pretty much all the time, and I’ve gone down that route ever since. I could show you some of my watercolor paintings over here.

I paint with watercolor and gouache. Oftentimes, these paintings are inspired by my travels or something that I experienced. For me, when I come back from a trip, I just want to, you know, put something on paper right away. This painting was inspired by a trip to Japan, and I saw a sitar player playing in a temple in Kyoto.

This one is inspired by a ski scene, and this one is going to be a sento, so bathhouse, in Japan, where they have these little scenes, these tiled scenes going on. I’m that one, the one that looks really excited to be there. The bigger paintings, the acrylic paintings, are kind of more large-scale finished pieces. I mix the colors myself in terms of these little containers.

All of them have different naming conventions on them, which is all the crazy writing you see all over them. This one is “Mount Tam, Big Sky, middle, Aspen, dunes, Oakland Museum number two.” You can see that, you know, even these paints, they kind of hold these records of what I’m doing. Now I can show you the other painting that I’m working on, but it’s back here.

This is when I was in Mount Tam at sunset. I wanted to make this painting, and as you can see, there’s no figures in it. I was interested in the way that the light kind of hits the mountain and above the clouds or above the sky. I feel like as I create more work, it’s been something where I’m learning about myself constantly.

The piece that I have at the de Young is called Mint Tea in the Sauna During Sunset. It’s based on my friend’s saunas here in the bay area called Good Hot. They built saunas on the water. The first time that I went there, I was so in awe of what they built. I was sitting in the sauna watching the sunset over Mount Tam.

I kept saying, “Wow, I can’t wait to make a painting of this.” The next day I went to my studio, and I started creating the painting exactly from what it looked like to me. One of my first jobs in San Francisco was working at the de Young, and I worked in the store when I was in art school, like as a summer job. For me to see my work on the walls and be in the permanent collection at the de Young, it means a lot to me. Feels kind of like a full-circle moment. Also kind of crazy for me to be like, “Yeah, one day I hope my art is on the walls,” and now it is.