I’ve always struggled with the narrative component of being an artist—not with having a story, but with knowing how to tell it. In many ways, that struggle has been the subject of my work for more than thirty years.

In the 1990s, I collaborated with a range of professional communicators including journalists, television writers, and police sketch artists, each translating me through the conventions of their own discipline. My identity emerged indirectly, refracted through multiple voices rather than asserted as a singular truth.

Years later, after stepping back from the art world when my children were young, I began painting women artists whose work I admired. What started as homage gradually evolved into something less like portraiture and more like conversation. Images were cut apart, layered, enlarged, recycled, and recombined. The paintings became less about representing individual artists than about describing what influence feels like from the inside.

Looking back, I realize that collaboration has always been my medium. The collaborators have simply changed—from journalists and illustrators to paintings, photographs, memories, historical artists, my daughter, my own archive, and chance itself. Recently, I’ve begun bringing imagery from my 1990s projects into new paintings, allowing my younger self to enter into conversation with my present one.

The artist in the studio has become an emblem for me—not simply of an individual, but of the lifelong project of becoming. My paintings ask how we construct a world—and ourselves—from the images, relationships, and memories we gather over a lifetime.