Statement - 2022
A woman in a painting is a figure.
I have a note-to-self from a few months after I began making figurative paintings, which reads, what if they had purses? Once the women in my paintings had purses, they had careers. People with careers aren’t figures.
I gave them boats—so that they could escape their careers, and I gave them binoculars to go birding, so they’d have a hobby. Clad in crop tops, they set loose, rampaging around the landscape. They smacked one another with their purses, let each other dangle from cliffs, and strangled any man who came onto them. And, at the end of the day, they simply piled into their dories and set out. Their lives were full of all the things human lives are full of.
I began to expand their world, which is a sort of utopian version of my own home in Maine. It is an otherworld which lies slightly beyond ours—not a world without struggle or tragedy—rather, a world in which the governing forces are slightly altered. Within this world, there are scenic attractions: cliffs, seascapes, trees—but also traffic cones to control who goes where, and the secret service to preside over important events. Now all my paintings—even those without women—are set in the otherworld, the world that the purse ladies built.
At some point, many of the people in my paintings find themselves—while on a path, or in the shallows—startled to turn and see their doppelgänger. These works show the uncanny moment when someone looks in the mirror and sees themselves exactly as they expect themselves to be and exactly as they are, with complete neutrality and total comprehension. Since making these works, I’ve found the paintings themselves—occasionally—gaze back toward me.