Mika

New portrait of Mika I just finished up.
18" x 24" Watercolor on Paper
I just want to keep painting BIGGER!!

Pearls Airport

I've always had a thing for rust and decay. Man-made structures left to rot. Slowly going back into the earth.
On the eastern side of the island you can see what remains of Pearls Airport. A few abandoned Cuban planes are scattered on the side of the runway that is now used for drag racing and cow grazing.

Interfusion

My brain is all over the place today. I'm trying to stay grounded but my mind keeps floating away onto other things.

I've been working on this painting where two mirror images blend together and the lines where one ends and the other begins are blurred.

Double Rainbow

We've been getting rain followed by sunshine followed by more rain and more sunshine. I walked out onto the front porch at just the right moment to see this.

Productive, Rainy Days

I love stormy, gray days in Grenada. The mountain in front of my building is barely visible through the white cloud of rain. We are officially out of the rainy season but this week has poured more than ever. The Southeast end of the island where I live is now 10 degrees cooler than it has been in months. It's quiet except for the sound of rain amplified as it falls against the galvanize rooftop. These days I just hole up in my tiny apartment, listen to podcasts and paint. The rain gives me permission not to leave.

I've been looking back through old photos for inspiration. I have so many images from photoshoots with my friends over the  years. Sometimes pictures I thought were not useful for paintings are now revealing themselves as quite the opposite. I'm constantly practicing how to be loose with my paint application. I have a tendency to overwork things. I'm trying to let my sketches and pencil marks remain visible under the paint and I'm working so hard to let my mistakes just be and not fix them.

Inside Looking Out

I rarely take my camera into town for fear of looking like a tourist but sometimes when I do I have the opportunity to capture some of the beauty and decay that is still visible from Hurricane Ivan over a decade ago.

Duality

There are all these different concepts I have been thinking about in my work recently. For years, and still currently, I have been exploring feminism through portraiture by painting women as confident and in control of their own image. We are so saturated with images of women's bodies created for the male gaze, art for centuries has been this way. I'm really interested in what happens when the gaze is switched and the viewer becomes the viewed.
I've also been thinking a lot about theater and performance, creating and exploring different characters and personas and how this parallels the human struggle of self-identity and gender-identity. How do we negotiate this within ourselves? Are we constantly playing different parts, trying on different roles? How do we stay connected to all of these different parts of ourselves.
I've been feeling very halved these days. Torn between two homes, two ethnicities, the child and the adult, two dualing halves that want different things from day to day.
How does one communicate between these parts of ones-self? How does one communicate between different parts of one's life?

Duality