"Tom" Acrylic background on wood with image painted in oil. 26.5" x 11.5"

This is my favorite face.  You might mistake this statement as a slight to our son, Owen, but on the contrary.  He is the proud owner of a perhaps even more lovely duplicate.   Tom has some strong genes, wouldn’t you say?  You might. But allow me to provide you with my alternate explanation…

I am a painter.  Every part of me is a painter.  Not just my hands.  Not just my eyes.  But my whole body.

I met Tom when I was nineteen years old.  That is when I began memorizing my favorite face.  Taking  it in  nearly every day.  When I was twenty-two, we got married.  Nearly every day became every day,  and eventually I could paint his face with my eyes closed.  Just before my twenty-fourth birthday, I discovered I was pregnant.  I believe this is when the painter in my belly got to work, recreating the face it knew by heart.

And yet, there is something uniquely “Owen” about Owen.  Yes, he does have my ears, but there is something there that is not Tom, and not me.  Something brand new.

My paintings are not recreations of people.  At their best, they are merely “about” someone.  No matter how much command I might feel I possess over my brush, at some point in the process, most often unwittingly, I loose the upper hand for a moment.  The painting has a life of its own, and it goes, ever so slightly, in it’s own direction. Every painting I have ever done has something about it that I feel just happened, inexplicably. Maybe this is part of the process.  Maybe this is what happened to the painter in my belly.

Either way, this is a face I am happy to see two of every day.  Expect to see many more paintings of both of them in the future.