"Magnolias" Painting

I paint mostly women and flowers, not as decoration, but as allegory. Flowers carry
something essentially feminine for me, the same emotional unpredictability and many-
layered nature I find in a woman's inner state. My figurative work is mostly oil, based on
reality, but that reality is translated into my own visual language the color of the sky
changed, an environment turned dreamlike. The women in these paintings are facets of
myself, and of other women, different states of being a female that don't yet have
words for me, but have a form and a color, painting is a way out.
When I move into abstraction, something else takes over. These works are mixed media,
driven by a masculine force, the line gets harder, more deliberate, the brushstrokes
almost willful. This masculine drive is in conversation with the feminine energy of my
figurative work, soft, intuitive, emotional. Figuration lets me speak as a woman;
abstraction lets me speak with a masculine energy.
I try to keep the process honest. Nothing in my paintings develops as a concept I set
out to illustrate; it finds its own terms. That's not always easy, there's a fear, somewhere
underneath, of taking up too much space. But the moments that matter most are the
ones where I forget to think about that entirely, where I even forget to breathe, where
painting takes over the fear and becomes a force. Express, feel, play always.