artist statement

Most of my paintings are portraits of people in the LGBTQIA+ community, and there are two different routes that my work usually takes. I think that there’s something important about painting normal queer spaces, without making a huge political statement, without making it sexual. But to just normalize painting queer people in situations that they are in in their day to day lives. 

 I’ve recently become fascinated by old photos of my mother and his friends performing in small drag bars in the early 2000s. Right around this time I was in elementary school, and I never got to experience this first hand. I would watch my mom duct tape his breasts down and glue hair to his face on the weekends and I never batted an eye. I came to love seeing photos of these tiny hole in-the-wall dives that are filled with so much community. The ones where, people like my mother, had a child at home, who work nine to five jobs and their co-workers have no idea that they go by “ingénue” in the night (This was a queens drag name, but it means “an unsophisticated and innocent woman”).

Painting them is a way that I can show my appreciation towards those people, and to remind myself how lucky I’ve been to experience it. These photos are like my gay inheritance of my mothers misadventures in the early 2000s. My mom is long retired in the drag scene (although he still goes by Leo), so this is a way that I’m able to remember and pay homage to an amazing culture of people who never make it into the media. I paint for my mom, for his friends, for my own girlfriend, and for all of the other small town queers.