Much to Bear Painting

Chinese ink, watercolor, toned cyanotypes, acrylic, paper collage, resin on paper, mounted on cradled wood panel. Ready to hang, no framing needed. From my 'Girls and Guise' Series: Throughout history, and irrefutably still to a degree today, the story of women has been told by men. The voice of women, the depiction of women, the desires of women, were and are largely controlled by a gender that has no experience or knowledge of what it is to be female. Our government, film and advertising industries have fewer women at the table to be representatives of who women are and what we want. This certainly has consequences on what women even believe themselves about who they should be, what they should value, and how they should project themselves. This work aims to shift the amplifier to a woman telling a woman’s story. Girls and Guise references a play on words. In this context guise references both the facade created by men of the female gender, and the heavy emphasis of the patterned clothing in the pieces. Their clothes, or guises, and environments are infused with feral and aggressive animals, a symbolic rebellion against the historical domesticated depiction of women. The jarring, faceless compositions represent any and all women who desire to define their own perspective and create their own narratives. Intentional hand gestures hint at conviction.