Artist Statement

The community within a city inspires my work. When I go out to explore a city, I can feel the emotion of people all around me. On these explorations I take photographs to document what I’m seeing. Photographing is an act of memory. When recording images of strangers, I see how they dress, how they style their hair and how they act naturally. By capturing a single person’s face, the individuality of the subjects comes through. From the photographs I’ve taken, I make mixed-media and watercolor drawings. Going back to look at the photographs allows me to have more time to reflect on the face of a person I don’t know. Studying their gesture while I make a drawing makes me feel more connected to them. It helps me remember the emotional experience of first seeing them. 

Watercolor can be very delicate and fluid, making it a challenge to portray people accurately. This “almost but not quite” accurately works to my advantage by making the person depicted appear far from “real,” a more stylistized representation. The gestures of my mark-making in the medium make the expressions in these figures' faces more profound. I also use mostly single color palettes to render these people. The associations I have with colors may be different than those others have. Stories and novels I read as a child and teenager encouraged me to think about people in a romanticized way. My artwork represents my adult self trying to connect back to that old way of understanding the world. Titling of my artworks with the titles from novels can allow a viewer to enter into a frame of mind that reflects imagination. In my artwork I want to create a space where my depictions of strangers function similar to a character from a novel, transforming an everyday experience of the reality of seeing strangers on the street into one of imagining each person’s story with wonder.