A picture is worth a thousand⬛️⬜️🟨🟧Creating a pixilation-style painting is a tedious process: technical, time consuming and requires a finely attuned eye for different color hues than regular brush stroke paintings. Just prepping the canvas is a mini project in itself. The art of mosaic/pixelation is the rewardings of its details from afar—the inverse of most traditional paintings where appreciation is upclose.
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ERA NOSTALGIA || I am a 90s enthusiast, so when I came across a rare polaroid of my muse Helena Christensen on the runway it enraptured me. It was just her in a graphic Versace tee with “virgine” on it. 2 months later after filing it in the back of my mind it’s loud voice got my attention enough that I decided to paint it. But it went beyond just the aesthetics: when you spend +25 hours on a project there has to be something powerful on a subconscious level that makes you devote that much time to a painting….
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“VIRGINE” || Although I was struck by the clean simplicity and sobering color scheme, I liked showcasing the juxtaposition where erotica and innocence collide: enter in the word “virgine” (Old English vernacular of virgin). Virginity is an enigma of a word: it encapsulates the beginning and the end of innocence which makes up so many of humanity’s very personal stories. Studying this piece on a sociological level, one has to, interestingly, step farther away to get more clarity—to understand the bigger picture of what almost cosmic importance it really is. That brings me to the paradox of virginity : it carries both a stigma and a virtue in this post Sexual Revolution we have lived in for over 50 years. Depending on age or cultural standards, one will pretend they lost their’s when they still have it—or pretend like they still have theirs when they already lost it. People are so quick to cross over this boundary, to lose their innocence, to downplay the sacredness and enigmatic power of such personal encounters. It’s the farthest you can go with someone physically but the truth is third base has always been more overrated than first and second.—where you get to know one’s heart and mind. Nonetheless, people are losing the context of its power to appease such fleeting popularity and pleasure, short circuiting themselves into adulthood per say and facing a certain level of cognitive dissonance in the process. I wonder what it is doing to the collective soul of our nation—and of our world…
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FEMALE EXISTENSIALISM || When I think further about some of my other artwork I’m passionate about, I realize I have a whole egg collection that encompasses paintings, collages and drawings. That makes me understand why I pick the subject matter so closely related to my XX humanity: I like to tease out the fundementals that exemplify the female existence and that which is attached to us on innate, historical, scientific and spiritual/metaphorical levels.
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