1. If you could go back in time to the beginning of your story, how would you represent that moment in colors?

​

2. While in the midst of your story, how would you represent this period of your journey in textures?

​

3. In the place that you are now, if you could describe this experience going forward, how would you do so with movement?

​

4. How would you describe your life now, represented in colors?

 

I use these questions to invite everyday people to describe their story of the journey that has brought them from an important moment in their lives to now. I listen to their own narrative of details and experiences that they find important to share; details that they claim have made an impact on their present selves. From answers to my questions, and their personal stories, I make collaborative, mixed media, portrait paintings of these people.

​

I am most interested in their subconscious ability to impact my decision-making processes for the artwork. Through their stories, the questions I ask, and the conversations we have, their information helps shape my formal choices. These interviews give me privileged information that produces portraits with an equal parts of form, media, and subject. The frame and the glass, the canvas that is not stretched; these are all stand-ins for the parts of the stories they told me about their lives. There are conventions in portraiture, which include the significance of the subjects painted. Traditionally, subjects in portraiture portrayed wealth, power, and virtue; specifically, in earlier portraits that captured royalty, heroes, and religious figures. I want to abstractly represent unlikely subjects in portraiture so that their story is not transparent to every viewer, but collaboratively, through the relationship we have made, designed to become a reflection of our private conversations.