what do I paint?

I paint a personal narrative or recollection, a self portrait with no image of myself. It is an upside-down world of characters thrust on the same stage, like puppets and props in a kind of morality play. It is meant to amuse and vex, incite aesthetic pleasure, and shake up familiar and transparent fixations. It is a place where certainty vanishes and we cannot rely on our senses to know the reason we do things and the reason we are. I try to uncover a part of an unconscious self that is revealed only when we are at one moment or another closer to death or closer to a childlike state. Closer to the beginning or to the end, we arrive ultimately at a defining place. It presents a purity or clarity of thought that is unencumbered by the daily grind of reality.

what are my current projects?

Boy with Ape "portraits". Standing portraits of youth with a "pet" ape to show the vulnerability of the human vis-a-vis the ape, the pretentiousness of decorum, and the similarity of master and pet.

Monkey Portraits. Portraits of 16th-17th Century redone with simian features. I chose to manipulate classic paintings that are vaguely familiar or perhaps only familiar in their style or manner of composition of that period. It was not a matter of putting apes in famous paintings, as I am not a realist in style, and the original paintings are very fleshy and realistic. I wanted to capture the spirit of a work while giving it a new twist and conveying a sense of majesty and vulnerability of their own, apart from the source that inspired them.

Allegorcial Paintings. Paintings of monkeys in allegories and mythologies. I substitute ape-like figures for humans in familiar images and stories. They take the place of the gods and semi-gods. I made use of the artificiality, the mild eroticism, and the interplay of characters of the original paintings - which are loosely mythological - to allow the fantasy and absurdity go one step further.

continuing projects?

This project reignites an old infatuation with Rococo decors and the delightfulness of that era's art and its strange take on human and animal combinations. The series is dominated by luscious colours and a tapestry of roses (or, in some cases, candies or insects) with figures that alight on the canvas like characters in a play. Each painting has its own story that depicts societal whims in a witty or tongue-in-cheek way. The patterns of adornments, such as the roses, are a subtext that implies that uniformity and repetition can be reassuring, but they dull our sensitivity and sense of wonder. Here the uniformity or conformity comes face-to-face with the bizarre and unnatural. The paintings are meant to be visually indulgent and playful but in content ambiguous and defiant.

The "hat" paintings were made as a continuation of my juxtaposing like figures in one frame, forcing a confinement of space that is both a natural and disconcerting aspect of close relationships. Hats have meaning for me not only as objects of ceremony and fashion but also as symbols of position and rank. The paintings are my amusement for people's preoccupation with status, which seems to even conceal their own identities as individuals.

In these earlier paintings, figures placed in close physical proximity are used to make personal statements about relationships, friendships, betrayal and self-awareness. They are either girls who are related to each other, such as sisters, or replicas of the same person reflecting upon herself. Being one of three sisters made me curious about how close we are to being the same person while being complete strangers, and the extension of that familiarity and estrangement paradox to oneself.

(update: December 21, 2004)