Colossus, 2011

This series was painted after losing someone I loved. I was reading Sylvia Plath at the time and her themes of loss and emotional paralysis resonated. This was only my second solo exhibition and I had 5 months to work on it, and hopefully prove that the success of the first show wasn’t a fluke. I stayed in the basement of an isolated log cabin in a remote farming area, 3 hours away from the city. While these are not images of Plath herself, the characters that came out of this project were reminiscent of her. Being hidden away in a log cabin after a devastating breakup, painting 14 hours a day, was the loneliest I’ve ever been in my life. At the same time, I knew if I could stay focused, I might build a new life as a full-time artist. These paintings bear out that experience. Conflicted figures trapped in simple demure settings. They are, at once, expanding and in the process of imploding.