About the Art

I paint the human figure in oil in the tradition of realism, exploring identity, race, community, the divine feminine, and generational ties. Depicting postures and gestures of the body, I probe the inner life as it relates to the context of societal expectations.

Drawing on the history-laden figurative genre, my use of materials invokes the past by employing aged and battered found objects. I integrate the items’ distressed surfaces with the human figure, making object-paintings in a constructivist process. Sometimes a weathered, worn object in an antique store immediately reveals what it was meant to be, and I transform it into an artwork.

The objects’ material reality merges with the painted images in introspective vignettes that conjure intimate states of being, memory, and identity. Tenuous yoga poses and seemingly impossible balancing acts become metaphors for the treacherous predicaments of life. Little things I can hold in my hand will land in my paintings – stones, shells, domestic objects. Juxtaposed with the figure, they suggest something like relics, objects of meditation, or dream symbols. Gestures of the figure hint of rituals, spiritual devotions, losses, and yearnings. Eastern meditation practice joins with the sublimity of Western art forms such as the gilded Romanesque arch.

My recent artmaking is highly informed by the life-changing discovery in 2017 of my Black ancestry. As a white woman, I learned that my ancestor, a free Black sea captain, was arrested in Maryland because of the color of his skin. At the time, I was involved in a collaborative art exhibition with Black artists, centered on the arrest and death of Sandra Bland. Later, I worked with those same artists on a grant I wrote for the Brazos Valley African American Museum. The grant became entangled with George Floyd’s murder and its turbulent aftermath. Learning of my own ancestor’s arrest while collaborating with these artists was transformative; it intensified and personalized my probing of race narratives in America. While conceptions of power and privilege cannot be expunged from my white vantage of Black bodies, I work collaboratively with Black models, trying to create images that can mediate discussions about Western societal notions of race, gender, and power.

Many of my pieces feature poignant hand gestures and mudras, as in my recent paintings of Black models’ hands in painful struggle. I continuously ask, as I create these works, whose story is it to tell? Does their story belong to me, the white descendant of a pre-Civil War, jailed Black man? How do I share with them the burden of history? This complicated relationship with my ancestors’ story is at the core of my current art-making.

Making these object-paintings is an investigation of personal states of being, which sometimes collide in their context of cultural expectations. Painting becomes a soul-growing, devotional act akin to meditation. The works are labor-intensive with repetitive mark-making and ardent personal involvement. These artworks intend to mediate with the viewer’s own history, perceptions, and identity, so both artist and audience can discover new meaning.