2021

I started painting again after my dad died unexpectedly in the summer of 2020. It became a meditation, an escape when all else felt unimaginable and unmanageable. I spent hours painting, piles of portraits marking my movement through heartache. In many ways, these faces saved me in those dark, lonely months. Had you asked me earlier what my relationship was to these subjects, I would have said it's less about them and more about the process—how time, and the intensity of the world, seemed to dissolve with the flick of a paint brush—but if you ask me now, I realize these strangers helped heal me. When I look at Gazing Woman, I see fortitude and sorrow, two emotions I know all too well now.