These past few years, I have intentionally made my paintings very personal but relayed through images of other characters’ lives.

Tintype photographic portraiture from the Civil War era, specifically those of women and children, are a tremendous inspiration to me. Their faces present possess a fearless and quietly proud, stoic state. They gaze and won’t back down, there is a fire within them, a quiet one that burns deep and solid.

Imagine a world with these feral children and woman, nurtured solely by nature and not by man-made creations. These subjects are operating on instinct and reverence of nature. They live in a land way out on the outskirts of a world we are unaware of, fairly untouched by modern day civilization. The embrace ritual, they decorate themselves with nature’s ornaments. Every day is filled with subtle individual ceremonies. In their portraits, I am capturing a moment of one of these creatures’ lives. You are watching their process of a strength undeterred by what is expected of them in the modern civilization.

I paint these intense, moody little characters with delicate curved lines and aged ink washes, which parallel the layers, fault lines and intricacies within each breath and moment of a human being.

I have gone back to collecting small discarded objects and obtaining very old fabric, pins, ribbon, sheets from school readers as I wander through my days. Little by little these found objects thoughtfully choose their destination and merge their way into my paintings. These little bits add curiosities as well as create a more tangible, believable reality to the memory of the person portrayed.