Portfolio > Lucys

Historically, painted portraiture has asserted the identity of the sitter; however no essential truth can be achieved beyond paint. A painting, like a name, presents a façade, a veil, behind which there can be no essence. Clothing, like loose canvas, is also an impermanent adornment. Each figure in the painting shares a fundamental tool of identification, the name Lucy. The name is deferred across the bodies that fill the painted surface. Each grasps it yet none saturates it or is saturated by it. The tools that allow us to consume another person, the name that situates them, render these sitters beyond what is knowable. The work un-names them through the act of painting.