Painting

Made Up, a body of paintings, expresses my love/loathe relationship with the beauty/fashion industries and the fantasy/deception they instill. Aging amplifies my fear of being rejected or invisible and is assuaged by being made-up. Pages torn from fashion layouts are manually distressed to become the visually striking crumpled images that are the basis for my painting. The wrinkled nature of my source communicates my frustration with aging and never being able to meet the standards of modern beauty ideals. My careful repainting of the disfiguration demonstrates my desire to intimately repair and own the image. In taking my power back through painting, the defiled magazine spread becomes a layout of my ability and power as a painter to create and control the illusion. Paint enables me to accept myself through the virtuosity of its application, scale, and in the resulting illusion, in which cathartic moments of subversive humor play out.

My thesis exhibition “Mercury Express” is the culmination of my creative research and the paintings that I have created over the past three years. This body of work is comprised of fourteen oil glaze paintings on canvas, ranging in size from 16x 16 inches to 36 x 48 inches. These paintings demonstrate, through subjective color and the application of misty layers of luminous paint, my residence on the edge of moving to the future and looking to the past. Through imagination my paintings express a longing for connections and offer glimpses of happiness tinted with a pervasive overcast of melancholy. Mercury Express is a visual expression of what I consider to be ‘Kitsch’, ‘Sentimental’ and ‘Adventurous’. Through this work I salvage and renew the child-like wonder that managed to survive into my adulthood. Through the positioning of remembered objects in imaginary landscapes, Mercury Express recalls and explores my childhood memories, ideas and aspirations to reclaim the wonder I have lost as an adult.