Artist Statement
I paint women, but I am less interested in what they look like than in what they contain.
My paintings explore the distance between the self we present and the self that exists beneath it — the parts of us that are hidden, divided, remembered, restrained, or still becoming. The women in my work are not portraits. They are psychological figures, sometimes singular and sometimes split across more than one body.
For many years, I painted women without faces. I did not initially understand this as a progression, but over time faces began to emerge. Looking back across the work, I can see a movement from concealment toward recognition: from being present but unreadable to becoming increasingly willing to be seen.
The environments surrounding these figures often operate in much the same way. What may appear to be a busy background is frequently an interior landscape. Layers of acrylic, ink, pastel, pattern, line, and imagery accumulate around the figure as expressions of memory, contradiction, longing, fear, beauty, and noise. The distinction between what surrounds a woman and what exists inside her intentionally becomes uncertain.
When two women appear together, they are often not two people at all. They are two aspects of one person — the self that stays and the self that escapes, the self that performs and the self that knows, the person we have been and the person we may still become.
Fashion photography has long influenced my visual language: its poses, elegance, artifice, and ability to construct an exterior identity. My roots in Louisiana and years spent in the Northeast have also shaped the work, particularly my attraction to contradiction — beauty and fracture, restraint and excess, belonging and estrangement.
I am a writer as well as a painter, and increasingly I understand the two practices as different ways of pursuing the same questions. In both, I return to identity, memory, longing, inheritance, and the stories we construct in order to understand ourselves and one another.
The paintings do not offer answers. They are attempts to make visible what ordinarily remains beneath the surface.
