Tapis Exhibition

“Sitting Child” 2003

24 inches x 36 inches

Oil and Resin on Canvas

“Betty” 2003

24 inches x 30 inches

Oil and Resin on Canvas

“Orphaned” photos collected from the 1800s and early 1900s are the inspiration for my work. These are unidentified photos that have turned up in antique stores or estate sales. In most cases these pictures were removed from family albums and sorted into lots for resale. Many lots contain diplomas, torn movie tickets and other mementos that someone had collected as token memories. I was saddened by such a discontinuity of a personal past. How could these photographs go unclaimed? Who did these photos belong to? Was someone looking for them somewhere?

My work gives me a feeling of preservation. The much-esteemed American historian Carl Becker, in his classic 1932 essay, "Everyman His Own Historian” wrote that “…in the lengthening perspective of the centuries, even the most striking events must inevitably, for posterity, fade away into pale replicas of the original picture, for each succeeding generation losing, as they recede into a more distant past, some significance that once was noted in them, some quality of enchantment that once was theirs.” Every one of the subjects in my paintings is a witness of the past. My work becomes a way to keep such passing images from fading entirely by reinventing them in some way. I can fix them in the context of my work so that they may live on in a new form, a form that both preserves the past and questions the loss.

I paint on eclectic objects and various scaled canvases as I try to recapture and somehow understand eerily familiar moments in time. Figures are painted from photographs, yet each painting varies from the original photograph in the way the image is cropped, how the image is focused, and the addition of other various elements. I create each composition through the interweaving of fragmented memories. Each painting becomes an accumulation of memories such as an old wallpaper pattern, vintage linens, or historical architecture. When not in the studio, I find myself exploring dated handwriting, vintage diaries, and discarded letters in an effort to somehow understand my subjects further.

Every photo reflects back an essential distillation of a moment, a person, or a place that mattered to someone. The images frame someone’s identity, past and current contexts. What stories do they tell? Who suffered? Who loved? The contemporary definition for nostalgia includes homesickness and, "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition" (Merriam-Webster).

Am I intensely nostalgic? Maybe. I do know that I have a strong sentimental yearning to live just a moment in each of these people lives.

My painting becomes an occasion of exploration and self-reflection. Where do I fit in history? Why was I confined to this specific generation and time period? At what point will I no longer be remembered?

“Nanny” 2003

24 inches x 41 inches (diptych)

24 inches x 20 inches each

Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas