These painted photographs explore the difference in perception of photographic and painted imagery. Photographs are presumed to represent reality: a moment in time, captured on film. Painted imagery is an illusion: it is fiction, as faulty as memory. But paint has the ability to reveal not only the physicality of a subject, but also its possible psychology and context in memory and emotion. By painting over sections of these photographs, I am striving to make the subject more potent, more meaningful, more permanent, and more compelling. The process involves first composing a self-portrait photograph, and then painting thickly over the skin, forming a mask of paint. In contrast the flat, glossy eyes appear thin and airy, as though the soul is trying to reach out beyond the heavy flesh. In some of the pieces, I’ve photographed myself standing in front of a painting, compounding the layered effect with painted imagery as part of the photograph, contrasted with the physicality of actual paint.
