artist statement

It is a challenge for me to be truthful with my own image, sparking my fascination with our societal standards of beauty and the need to manipulate our faces to appease it. My work consists of digital photographs extremely close to my face and tall tightly cropped acrylic paintings sectioning and responding to these photographs. My face is my focus, as I choose to manipulate and change my look through makeup, hair, and lighting - highlighting my features and expressions. An uncomfortable image becomes beautiful through the presentation of a delicate texture. This texture is made with soft makeup-like marks of paint tapped-on with a stencil brush. It is my self-constructed therapy to emphasis the areas of my face that I find intriguing in my digital photographs and interpret these sections into paintings as a way of literally
"Facing Me."