I paint to remind the viewer of their own flesh. I expand the interior of the body into spaces that are vast and luminescent. I make the microscopic visible to the naked eye. The body becomes landscape; the interior becomes the exterior. As paintings of the body, zoomed in illustrations of the intimate, my paintings are obscene without being pornographic.

I depict the abject, as Julia Kristeva describes it, in order to show the fragility of the barrier separating the inside of the body from the outside and keep in mind Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime to prevent my work from becoming beautiful formally, in a way that would rob my work of substance. The photographers Jeanne Dunning and Emiko Kasahara, use the body as subject, showing the interior of the body as something luminescent and beautiful but still repulsive and uncomfortable. Kristeva and Immanuel Kant’s concepts of the sublime factor into my work. Kant describes the sublime as something vast that is almost incomprehensible. Once the individual can begin to comprehend the sublime, they are changed by it. Emiko Kasahara’s Pink series use the sublime in the same way that I incorporate it into my work. Keeping in mind the abject and the sublime allows me to move away from Georgia O’Keefe-like depictions of the beautiful natural body in order to examine the discomfort with bodily closeness.

Orifices are tunnels into the most intimate parts of people, literally and figuratively. They are hallways into the inner workings of the body. Orifices advertise the potential for genuine interaction. This opportunity is often missed. I meditate on orifices. The orifices I paint are imaginary. The colors are often too pink and pretty. They invite through their familiarity and repulse by their shape and juxtaposition.

My paintings are static documentations of the desire to reach out, without fear, and touch someone else. They understand that this is a bad wish, that this fear exists for a reason. The imaginary organs and orifices, though referential, are loosely based in reality. The oversaturated color and pastel disgust of these orifices and organs shows that a desire for intimacy without boundaries is heartfelt but ultimately destructive.