Cellblock One, 2022

These studies of vintage mugshots started over the Covid lockdowns. I’d been collecting a few police photos of incarcerated women that I thought were intriguing for years and then I came across quite a few from Montreal in the 40’s. After researching the photos, I discovered it was at a time when the Montreal Police Department had initiated a crackdown on soliciting because of a widespread increase in venereal disease. The faces in these photographs reminded me of paintings by Otto Dix and Kees Van Dongen. The first 3 paintings I finished were loosely based on the women in these black and white police photos. As the series progressed, the characters developed more from imagination. Not realizing I would stretch this into a full series, the concept eventually became one female mugshot for every decade of the 20th century.