Portrait Series

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The human psyche has long fascinated me, and in this work, particularly how one's exterior manifestations telegraph the workings of the inner being. The focus was on the face, a part of the body that has the most concentrated set of muscles in the body and is considered the most closely expressive of the personality and thought of an individual. My interest was in the gray areas of our psyches and how that can be represented in the physical body as a complex whole.

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Each human story, each life lived, is a fascination to me. How can so many people inhabit the earth yet still be separate and unique individuals? It seems impossible, yet, it is true. Human behavior is fraught with mysteries, evidenced by the complex and changing equation of its parts: biological and physiological systems, environmental influences and the elusive definition of the spirit.

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The next step of my investigation led me to explore how I could represent snapshots of immediate, coexisting emotion and thought. I created layered imagery by weaving together two separate paintings of different expressions. The weaving is a metaphor for the multiplicity and interconnectedness of our human emotions and thoughts. In addition, because half of each painting is hidden by virtue of the overlap of the weave, the woven painting also symbolizes hidden or little understood aspects of our individual natures.

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As I continued along this path of exploration, I began rearranging the representational portrait through cutting and manipulating the canvas into a synthesized three dimensional portrait.