Aline
Marbella
Villanueva

I paint the threshold — the place where the world you can see meets the world you can only feel.

For me, that threshold is often literal: a backyard, a neighbor's fence line, the quiet edge of domestic life. I'm drawn to the people just past that boundary — a grandchild, a neighbor, a soldier home from deployment, a face half-remembered from a family photo. These aren't grand subjects. They're intimate ones. But painted closely enough, they open onto something larger: what a place or a person holds beneath the surface, what gets left behind, what almost isn't visible until you stay with it long enough.

My process mirrors that idea. Some paintings arrive in a single sitting, direct from life. Most are built slowly — mark upon mark, each layer shaped by what came before it. I'm less interested in inventing an image than in letting one reveal itself through accumulation, the way memory does.

Color, for me, isn't decoration — it's instinct made visible. An impulsive color choice is often more honest than an observed one; it tells you what the eye alone can't. I've spent time studying painters like Sargent and Sorolla not to imitate them, but to understand how they let color carry feeling as much as light.

Beauty, in this work, isn't something to capture and hold. It's something to stand near — a shadow cast by whatever's just out of reach — and to leave trace of that nearness in the paint.

Currently in development: Backyard Chronicles, a collection exploring the intimate wilderness found at the threshold of domestic life — the people, animals, and quiet dramas that live just past the back door.