Kiddie Pool Painting

Two pre-teen girls in bikinis stand jauntily ankle deep in a blow-up kiddie pool. This image is painted from a found photograph, so I don’t personally know these girls, but I felt that I knew them when I saw the photo. They are every girl, caught between childhood and adolescence, trying on womanhood. The image reminded me of a friendship I had at that age, and how when we went out walking in our small town, we would count “looks” from men as they just had started to notice us. This piece is part of the "like a girl' body of work, focusing on representations of girls and young women on the path to discovering their own identities. Painted in oil using a combination of washes, solid blocks of color, layered brushwork, and thick impasto applied with a palette knife, the images play with the rules of pictorial space while evoking nostalgia, dreams, and memories of childhood and adolescence. Wortham’s award-winning painting “Girl” was aptly described by Minneapolis Star-Tribune art critic Mary Abbe as capturing “the mingled hostility, curiosity, and vulnerability” of girlhood in its many stages.