My psychologically charged, intimately scaled oil paintings and drawings of the body are peepholes through which I grant viewers access to my secrets. I expose the complexities of gender and the ugliness that lies behind the socially acceptable façade of clothing and forced smiles and reveal an unexpected beauty that heightens the viewer’s self-awareness. The universal urge to confess helps me connect to viewers, whom may themselves be hiding emotional or physical scars.

In 2005 I began creating self-portraits. Motivated by my personal experiences as a female to male transgender person, these works chronicle my physical evolution and examine its related emotional sate.

Though representational, my often macro look makes the work border on the abstract while illuminating the formal elements I examine so closely. Scrapes are pink, and bruises are blue that fade to jades and then to golds. I am captivated by the alchemical properties of the human body which transfer trauma into delicate prettiness. I aim for viewers to be lulled by my sensuous, fleshy brushstrokes only to be shocked by the rawness of the subject. Like rubberneckers, they cannot turn away from what can be interpreted as ugly, uncomfortable and even, to some, offensive. This work emanates from my unique experiences, but I hope viewers will find themselves more conscious of their own bodies. In this way these pieces are like 2-way mirrors.

While differently motivated than artists such as Orlan, there is a performative aspect to the work. My body, like yours and like my paint is pliable. Taking testosterone made me aware that my body had become an artwork in a way; it is an object of my own creation. The multi panel painting “From There to Here” depicts the healing of my scars from chest surgery, after which it occurred to me that I had yet again mutated. This time a surgeon, like a magician, sawed me in half, but was not able to put me back together seamlessly. I carry this stranger's pentamente on my body; I have to live with the residue of someone else’s drawing emblazoned across my chest. Do these modifications make me more of a “real” man or do the marks prove me a simulacrum?

I have always been fascinated by dichotomies. I aim to deconstruct the barriers between the cruelty and artistry of biology, and the conflict of private and public, all the while doing so with aesthetic grace.