I remember as a girl in elementary school going into an art museum and seeing a portrait of a young lady. She was standing above a landscape and the wind blew her pink dress and pink ribbons from her hat. I believe the story was that she fell ill and died young. Maybe the allure of the piece’s provenance was what got me wondering. But as I looked at the brushstrokes in her face, the soft pale skin tones, the highlights in the eyes or the surrounding landscape, I wondered who this person really was. What was she like? What did people think of her? What was it that made her so special that she should be captured in this medium for lifetime after lifetime, and strangers could hear the tale of her short life, true or not... There is something so intimate about painting another person. Each stroke of the brush represents a tactile part of the subject’s body. There’s a realization I have about that body’s structure, it’s markings, changes in color... The model is letting me see it and record it. Looking at an artist’s brushstrokes on a figure is like looking on that moment the artist saw it on the body. The painter is sharing a moment with the subject and the viewer at the same time. Or, the painter is sharing a moment with the viewer and the subject is unaware. Pointing out to you “Do you see how that part of the hand becomes rough and dark from the sun? Do you see the blue in the shadow on her neck or the light that reflects up from her shirt?” I want to share that with the viewer in my own work. When I look at my paintings I can almost remember making each stroke. Sometimes I see a moment in a piece and think that I don’t remember putting that paint on the canvas at all. Then I get to see it almost for the first time and realize how beautiful it looks. I want to incite that curiosity I feel when I look at a Caravaggio, Botticelli, Lucien Freud or Singer-Sargent painting.