Andrew's mother asked me one day, "How long does it take you to do one of those paintings? We'd like you to do one for us." I got so excited. I wanted to do a painting for them, but I didn't have a picture of them that would work in this style. Then she corrected me - she meant one of me and Andrew. She and Poppy are such sweethearts.

Andrew and I did a self-portrait photo-shoot that devolved into complete goofiness. We weren't getting any good pictures thanks to honked noses and fingers in ears. Near the end of the silliness, I caught this shot. I knew it was the one I would use the moment I saw it.

This painting is on 30" by 40" gallery wrapped canvas (no staples show around the edges) and was completed in the fall of 2004. I painted the 1.5" deep edges black in lieu of a frame.

This painting is a self-portrait of my husband and me that I completed late in 2003. Like the previous painting, it's on an 11" by 14" canvas panel. We took the photo on which this is based on an airplane returning from a trip to the midwest to visit family.

When I painted this one, I decided to put more colors between the light and dark values. It's interesting that the added colors create a more realistic image of us, but at the same time the shapes of each color become even more fractured and erratic. I choose the close up of my lips as an example of this. The black blobs on the left edge my mouth look crude and jagged close up, but when you look at them in the context of the painting, they *are* my lips.

This painting hangs in our bedroom. At night when the lights are out and the half-light of the night is seeping in the windows, our faces seem to emerge from the canvas like sculpture. You can almost get the same effect by squinting when you look at it.

This is a 11" by 14" painting on a canvas panel that I completed January 2003. The photo of my husband and I that I used as reference was a self-portrait we took during an unscheduled 9-hour layover in the Dallas airport. Taking pictures was how we entertained ourselves before buying a deck of cards at the gift shop. We always like this one in particular. We thought it looked like an indie rock album cover, so we started calling it our Rockstar photo.

This is the second painting I did in this style.

I'm fascinated by the way the flat color shapes all fit together to create the image. After mixing the colors, I spend weeks painting all the little areas with a small brush. During that time, every shape becomes abstracted from the whole and exists for me as a blob of brown or a squiggle of blue. You can see this at work on the left edge of Andrew's glasses; it is a disparate mixture of colors and shapes. Once I'm done and I step back from the canvas, each blob and squiggle combines to create the image.