IMAGES | STATEMENT | RESUME

For her upcoming solo exhibition Resting Place

Whatever I paint I like to focus on creating a realistic light. My interiors usually feature a space, furniture, and objects hit by light. I hope it will create a mood. I want the viewer to wonder: What happened here? Who left? Is someone coming back?

This past year I have started experimenting with opening up the space, lending a sense of possibility.

The interiors are similar, but another scene may be visible outside and window, in a back room, or in a small painting hanging on the wall. This gives me, as well as the viewer, two pictures instead of one. I hope this will add to the mystery.

A Non-Traditional Path Toward the Traditional

Over the past years, several people have been kind enough to let me photograph the interiors of their houses Ð always older buildings, some of them recently gutted or in the porcess of renovation. The light in these houses has a special quality; something about the way those deep-set, bare old windows handle natural light is particularly interesting to me.

When these photographs are developed, I use them as a reference point. Sometimes I am relatively faithful to the photographs, merely intensifying shadows or deepening the texture of the walls. Other times, I insert pieces of furniture, or fabricate another light source, or actually expand the size of the room or the arrangement of doors and windows.

I like to think of myself as a traditional oil painter, but in fact I begin a picture in a fairly unconventional way: with scanned-down versions of my own drawings, layers of washes, blocks of cut-out white paper (for the light sources), all applied to one composite sheet and sealed with a clear gesso. Then I proceed with the oils, and finish with as many as ten glazes.

My hope for the final outcome is a picture that, while it is in some ways realistic, has a dreamlike, painterly feel to it.