For much of my career as a painter, images of people have been an obsession, accompanied by an intrinsic narrative. I have created many portraits invented from various sources, my interest being mainly to create a distinctive character implied by the subject.  In larger complicated work I often construct more than one figure and elements from nature and modern civilization are being absorbed.  It feels like a natural evolution.  I like to use color so the figures merge into the ground of the painting a bit, allowing for places occasionally where the paint could emerge and possibly share the stage. However, I can’t seem to shake the need to invent precise characters like a writer, only without words.

In the last decade I began focusing on the young subject; they are mostly girls with their particular discomfort in accepting the cultural paradigm of womanhood.  I adapted aggressive postures to gently mock the macho stance of classical male sculpture.  The Greek warriors and pontificating orators, sexy satyrs and slightly intoxicated gods seemed a perfect attitude for my bumptious girls. Copying these icons with their self-confident stance, worked to give my pre-adolescents the gravity they need to compete with the paradigm of self-conscious girls presented by the media.

With the intensity of girls at play in mind, I have been literally focusing on twelve year olds, photographing them and reinterpreting their personae as they enter the cusp in life where girls hover before entering full-blown adolescence.  My last one-person show on this subject was titled “On the Verge”.  I still borrow from art history but male stances from extreme sports magazines and the newspaper sports page have also become sources.  Sometimes soft background images of girlhood from my generation are used as counterpoint to these active subjects. Playful, but dead serious, I think of my figures as feminine foot soldiers in the process of becoming women in a complex new world.