Artist Statement Intermundium: space between worlds   2021

In the summer of 2019, I traveled to Ireland for an extended painting trip, renting a cottage for a month on the rugged Sheepshead Peninsula in West Cork, and then driving the circumference of the island for more exploration and painting. Along with my husband, also a painter, I’ve been going abroad to paint for many years to focus on plein air. This trip was different: it was the first time where I planned on gathering inspiration and taking references for my figurative work. 

In my figure paintings I veer from strict naturalism toward the poetic, emphasizing minimal environments, lost edges, and transparent passages. My flesh palette is purposefully high-key and desaturated giving my figures a marble-like sense of solidity while also embodying the ethereal. I hoped Ireland would evoke the poetic and ethereal imagery I seek in my work. My hopes were realized in the megalithic sites and the vast landscape of West Cork—I saw sleeping dragons in the stony hillsides, and felt I was straddling different ages when standing before the ancient stones. I returned with a bounty of references and studies from life to begin my work.

As I worked the long hours in the studio during the pandemic, these paintings of Ireland served as an escape from current affairs of the world, and at the same time forced me to think deeper about issues such as my identity. A smaller work, of a single standing stone for example, would serve as an escape—I loved to get lost in building up the textures layer by layer. Or I could escape into the ancient stone circles and imagine a connection to a culture long disappeared. Then there was me. I’m the person in all these figurative paintings, and I spent countless hours staring at myself. In past work I am just one of many muses for any given series, with the overall feeling always outweighing portrait likeness. I’m pretty good at separating me from my painted image, but this time it was harder. I found myself thinking more about my own identity – how I see myself vs. how the world sees me. I am of mixed race—neither fully in one world nor the other. I wondered if I would lose my culture when my mom (the clear link to my Chinese heritage) is gone. This brought me, in one painting, to incorporate her features into my own. In other works, I found my technique of obscuring the lines of the dress with overlapping clouds taking on new meaning, expressing the veiled complexity of who I am. 

Ireland has always had a magical hold on me. Since I was young and immersed in fantasy books, I often pictured them taking place in lands that looked like Ireland. I’m one-fourth Irish, but I wasn’t brought up with a personal connection to that culture, so it exerts a mythic pull on me. The hours spent creating this body of work has bridged my imagination with the actual power and beauty of this land.


Previous Artist Statement 2017
My art is a culmination of the experiences I’ve gathered from life and literature, places visited, dreamt of, and imagined.  I have always cherished the qualities of literature and the arts that allow me to explore beyond myself and beyond what I know.  I strive to imbue my own work with similar traits.  In each piece my challenge is to create a narrative whether out in nature, in an interior setting, or depicting a figure.  My paintings are about possibilities.

When working on a studio painting, the conception is entirely my own, but when I’m painting en plein air, my surroundings have a say in my imagery, narrative, and composition.  In both I attempt to capture a likeness of a location or subject, and also to capture experiences and emotions. The way light falls and creates shadows, or air particles accumulate over a distance and shimmer, an unanticipated pose struck by the model, all affects my experiences as I’m working. 

Though my training focused primarily on the figure and so does my studio work, in my plein air and landscape paintings I often purposefully leave people out.  I feel that having specific people in a painting, in some way, may make it more difficult for the viewer to enter and have their own experiences.  They will instead think about what those people are doing and experiencing.  Whereas allowing traces and hints that people were there and may come again, helps to invite a viewer in but leaves what happens next wide open.