Artist Statement
From a vocabulary of images, I compile a visual sensibility and a pictorial world — a habitat for my female protagonists and their various accoutrements. The sources can range from 60’s fashion advertising and vintage book covers, New Wave and Noir to personal fashion sense and Etruscan wall painting. Instead of looking at an image that inspires me directly, I often try to replicate it from memory, allowing a distortion to enter into the process.

The pictorial events in my paintings are not narrative but visual and sometimes aspire to an unspoken punch line. The figure functions as the vessel and the space onto which an often wise-cracking tableau occurs. The inanimate objects become characters that interact within a framework of a painted reality. Glimpses of realistic illusion quickly fade into a self-reflexive overall flatness.

I distract myself from thoughts of the ultimate betrayal of the body (betrayal in a sense of its inevitable decay) by engaging with the feminine image in graphic/comical ways. I want to channel an attitude, to create a sense of drama with some comedic relief, to convey a heightened state of a woman always “on the verge of a nervous breakdown”.