The Blends painting project is 3 years in the making and ongoing, with over 30 paintings completed to date. The series began as a way to explore my multi-culturalism as a uniquely blended individual, along with the intention to collect and portray narratives from friends and acquaintances. Abstraction begins with content as the paintings develop from solicited lists and stories of real peoples’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds and experiences. The blended-ness of people creates interesting identity issues that the abstract “portraits” explore through formal investigation: colors are distinct, but layered together they become new forms, and the paintings develop as I join these parts into harmony. In this way, I am constructing composite “portraits” made up of colors and shapes that combine visually to create a new and complex identity. Paintings are exhibited with the corresponding stories.

Considering concepts of identity in our current state of things, I have been exploring compositions in diptych format using abstract head-like forms paired as a couple but with gazes that do not include the other. The paintings are loosely informed by paintings of couples by David Hockney, which show a pair of individuals in a space together, but not necessarily including the other in their portrait. This type of image, to me, reflects on our current moment of isolation and inter-dependency. Are we as humans becoming more isolated, even as we become more intertwined?

These works are composed with the notion that each individual is their own unique blend, but all are part of, and reliant upon, a larger system. All works in this project are made with oil paint and resin on panel with additional mixed media.

Another series titled Common Threads comprises of abstract paintings that metaphorically allude to the links, or threads, tying people, groups, and communities together across differences. We often find ourselves faced with addressing the differences between people, via identity, politics, economic stature, family origin, and more. Real entwined thread, or pulled lengths of wool, in the Common Threads paintings are a metaphor for commonly shared experiences bridging these different identity issues. Shared experiences bind people and their histories together in intimately interesting ways. I am working to use these links and metaphoric threads as a means to find common ground and harmony.