Shadowlands

These paintings are of people who shaped me — family, friends, former lovers. Some are still in my life. Others are gone. The series grew out of a simple need to look at them again.

Painting is how I go back. Working from photographs that are sometimes decades old, I spend months with a face, with the quality of a person’s attention, the particular way they held themselves in a moment I happened to catch. The paintings rarely end where I expected them to. That, I’ve come to think, is part of the point.

These paintings began as portraits, but they became something else: a way of revisiting relationships that mattered, understanding them more clearly, and occasionally laying them to rest.

The works here span more than twenty years. Between them, they cover a good deal of my life.