These paintings are part of a series titled Inside World, The Quarantine Chronicles. In 2020 I participated in a collaborative project where I was paired (remotely) with photographer Jessica Chappe. The collaboration went as follows: Jessica sent me a photograph to which I responded with a painting which I emailed her. She in turn responded to a photograph and sent it to me and so forth. The images we produced first started as a visual response to color and pattern. It quickly became clear that it reflected our inner world, the comfort we found in nature, and the isolation we were experiencing during the pandemic, thus the title Inside World. These larger works are based on the small paintings I created during the collaboration.
The “Moth Women” paintings are inspired by my interest in nature, magical realism, and masks. I am intrigued in how our perception of people changes when they are only partially visible and how we, as individuals, are transformed, and sometimes empowered, when we disguise or embellish ourselves.
Through these ongoing series of drawings, I capture what I perceive as moments of stillness in my life. Some drawings are sparsely populated. Others show people cropped or in the shape of a shadow. Others yet are devoid of figures and depict solitary streets or landscapes. The simplification method I use when making these allow me to distill what I see into something that is not only new, but also calmer and more orderly than our reality the past couple of years.
