When I was little I went to a private school. There weren't many kids there and we saw the same people every year. Needless to say, it was an extremely sheltered environment to be in from age six to thirteen. Sex ed was nonexistent, and the teachers would rather not talk about it anyway. Sex was for procreation, and so was marriage. If you kissed someone, you got detention. If you held hands, your name got written up. Relationships - real relationships - didn't exist.
In highschool I was a pariah. Undersocialized and over educated, I was labeled many things. So, rather than friends or boyfriends, I developed relationships with the images in my head. I began to draw.
Drawing is a relationship I am extremely comfortable with. I always begin with a drawing. Drawing directs everything. My discovery happens with a drawing; the painting part seems to be just an afterthought. In college, my drawings got better, and I began to draw things that had been in my head since eigth grade.
My undersocialization as a girl has lent itself very strongly to my work. The figures tend to be strange girl-women, not quite children and not quite grown. The relationships they form witnin a piece are usually dictated by conflict - conflicts with inner demons, with the outside world, with what people think they should be, or want them to become. It is the loss of girlhood, and before adulthood; they are on the brink of knowledge without the understanding. The girl-women in my pieces exist in a strange limbo of age and mentality; they know the demons are there, and they know the relationships are there, but they don't understand them or how to get rid of them or why they desire what they do.
It is a darker side of femininity that happens in my work. Real relationships always have a flipside, like two sides of a coin, and my work is my own attempt to understand that. Whatever the relastionip may be, there is a silver side and a darker shadow underneath; as all human nature can attest.
