Harpeth Portraits

PROCESS

I am interested in exploring the often strangely beautiful and ambiguous environments children inhabit. A seemingly ordinary tea party, or teacup, is actually quite extraordinary when seen through the eyes of a child, or through gauzy childhood memories. Because it captures the absurdities of childhood so well, one major source of inspiration is the book Alice in Wonderland. Alice is constantly bombarded with fleeting, ambiguous and ever-changing rules. Asked by the Cheshire cat at the croquet game, “How are you getting on?” Alice replies “I don’t think they play at all fairly…. And they don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them.”

Indeed the world Alice has come upon is a strange one. The child’s inner world is often much like Alice’s: fraught with anxiety, ambiguity, and uncanny beauties. It is precisely this curious, often absurd realm which youth occupy that I find so intriguing.

The artist collaborates with the patron to decide on subject matter and size.  The average painting requires approximately three to four months for completion. The artist can work either from life or from photographs, often a combination of the two. Fifty percent is collected when the picture is commissioned. 

Estimate for one figure