Artist’s Statement
In my paintings, I
attempt to depict a dichotomy of human emotion that focuses on the tension
between depression and alienation on the one hand, and tenderness and beauty on
the other. The process of nursing, hospitalization, therapy and rehabilitation provide interesting avenues for
exploring the complexity of these emotions. These nurse paintings attempt to capture
the inherent beauty and poignancy of the process of nursing as a healing, as a
reaching out to the unfortunate, set against an undercurrent of the pain of the
sick and the lonely and the possibility (or often the fact) that this
institutionalized healing does more harm than good.
In these paintings,
the nurse herself is a powerful symbol with a variety of contradictory
pre-packaged connotations: there
are kind and caring nurses, naughty nurses, or cruel, cold and controlling
nurses. For me, these connotations
reflect the contradictions inherent in the human condition, a different moment
in the process of either healing or degeneration.
I have purposely made
these paintings on a small scale with the largest being only 8 inches by 10
inches. This intimate size focuses
the viewer in on these small, fleeting gestures and interactions in an attempt
to capture their subtle strangeness and complexity. The title of this body of work, “Random
Acts of Kindness,” (a phrase taken from self-help guru Oprah Winfrey) also
evokes the “whisper scale” of these moments and hopefully conveys the idea that
a healing or an inadvertent destruction can happen in a moment, be it through a
glance, a touch, or a few words. |
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