dyed silk, oil paint, and graphite

2026

Painting is a new passion which compelled me to make a series of self-portraits. Rather than fear my lack of skills, I decided to lean into play. I continue to explore color, line, and texture in a new medium, and in the context of representation.

Painting or drawing my face, day after day, without too much judgment, was an adventure, and sustained my curiosity. I grew to love these pieces and found that their quirks were expressive of my many selves, like the selves we all carry.

Surely we are far too captivated by youth as an ideal that we want to fix (in both senses) by all manner of preventions and treatments. Yet I agree that aging, as my mother used to say, is not for the faint of heart. Painting self-portraits in my 60s is one way to move past this cultural nonsense, and assert that self-portraiture can be the presentation of emotional, physical, and psychological states.

These portraits are more akin to goddesses. The goddesses I pray to, the goddesses of my ancestor’s ghosts, the goddesses within me that I could claim by titling each painting.

Formally speaking, I see the self portraits as a collection of explorations in new materials that are about the problem of self- portraiture. A friend complained that they didn’t look like me. Another claimed they were unresolved. Yes and yes. But maybe that’s not the point here. Maybe it’s about how the longer we live, the more we are transformed by our encounters with joy, and also with losses of all kinds, with increasing frequency. It has been a challenge, a risk, and a pleasure to explore this new terrain, and am developing a visual vocabulary as I proceed. What these portraits become continues to show me more compositional possibilities.