Four Bathers Get Up, oil on linen, 24" x 30" x 1"" The four nude women depicted in Picasso's pencil drawing (1921) rise in a tangle of vital power in this work, painted over 100 years later.
The nude holds the pulse of our shared humanity. These paintings are representative of my body of work "Consider the Hands" (2023). Playing on Picasso’s idealized and outsized women, this work coincides with the reappraisal of his legacy, fifty years after his death. Grouped or single figures are reimagined in landscapes from my own photographs and drawings. Rising waters in a slightly skewed and quietly ominous landscape predominate. Understatement, glitchy shifts of point of view and depth of field create rhythmic, sometimes shimmery moments of transparency and opacity, resonant of the process of personal and societal reappraisal underway for many of us.