The Foundational Paintings (2021–2025)
The Foundational Paintings chart the emergence of my visual language, unfolding across several years yet bound by a relentless urgency of gesture and emotion. Begun in 2021 and continuing to the present, the series lays the emotional and material groundwork for my practice. These works arose in moments when words faltered but feeling demanded form - raw, unmediated, and insistent, painted as if each mark were a necessity rather than a choice. The canvases stage a reckoning with self, with sensation. Moving between portraiture and abstraction, they mark the moment when I began to trust that painting could hold everything and transmute it into relation. They are both beginnings and endings, and every mark remains charged with the energy of what is still to come.
The earliest canvases (2021–2023) bear the explosive immediacy of anger, grief, and rupture. Here, paint becomes a release valve, an exorcism of emotion through jagged color, crude marks, and anti-aesthetic refusals that privilege truth over polish. Bodies, landscapes, and objects appear almost unwillingly, dragged into existence by the force of gesture rather than carefully rendered intention. By contrast, the later works (2024–2025) reveal not a softening but a deepening: the same vocabulary of gesture, color, and texture turns toward intimacy, repair, and persistence. If the earlier works are cries, the later ones are conversations with self, with my children, with my partners, and with the multiple roles of motherhood and womanhood, at once blessing and burden, fracture and bond.
What binds the series is the conviction that painting operates as an embodied language. Gesture here carries the weight of feeling, as if emotion itself were transposed from body to surface. Color functions not as ornament but as atmosphere, vibrating with grief, happiness, tenderness, and survival. Rhythm arises not from formal composition but from the repetition of movement and the insistence of brush, hand, and body tracing a path from rupture toward relation. Titles extend this world, naming intimacy and entanglement, collapsing the boundary between self and other, where vulnerability becomes both shared and witnessed.
The Foundational Paintings are not static images but living records of a moment. They are an archive of emotion, of tears metabolized into form, of an artist learning to trust intuition, to let the body speak, and to allow process itself to carry meaning. They are artifacts of 'becoming:' quiet beginnings that are also charged continuations. Each canvas pulses with energy, expectation, and desire, charged with addiction and release, with motion and raw naïveté, and at times with representations that gesture toward bodies, landscapes, and objects without ever confining them.
