Piece of Me, 2006
Piece of Me is a self-portrait that I painted on 282 individual 4"x4" canvases. Each canvas was meant to represent a piece of myself while also being unique enough to be interesting individually. In order to make each canvas interesting, I etched self-reflective words into the background canvases, and I used unusual brush strokes, shapes, and mark making within the portrait part of the painting.
Epiphany, 2007
Epiphany is a 48"x48" black and white self-portrait on canvas with a black and white video inlay where the left eye would be. In that video, my eye moves around, looking this way and that way, and it only blinks twice. When my eye blinks the first time, the video turns to color. A second later, it blinks again and returns back to black and white.
In addition to the video, Epiphany has words etched into the background. Those words are culled from various sources, some of the words were mine, and many came from elsewhere. The sources I culled the words from were intentionally random. This was done in order to set up a metaphor.
That metaphor was this; you never know when inspiration might strike or where it might come from. One minute you could be lost, unable to figure something out. Then in a blink of an eye, as if out of nowhere, everything becomes clear. That is an epiphany, and that is the meaning of this painting.
