BODIES 2021, Mixed Media on Canvas
Painted at full scale, these women take up exactly the room they take up. No more, no less. Some figures push against the edges of the canvas, barely contained by the frame — a tension that is not a miscalculation but a refusal to shrink the body to fit expectation. Two are self-portraits; the others were built from memory, reference, and invention. None of the poses perform. There is no smile, no display, no arrangement of the body for a viewer's pleasure. Instead, each woman is caught mid-thought — distracted, unimpressed, resting, faintly annoyed at being watched. A body, unclothed, is simply a body. It becomes sexual only through the intent brought to looking at it — and these paintings are built to resist that intent, to hold the viewer's gaze at arm's length rather than meet it halfway.
What I want, in the end, is parity: a larger body, painted seriously and without apology, carrying the same depth, grace, and interiority as any other.
