My recent paintings are oil portraits of people—usually iconic figures from the past—who haunt the collective unconscious. These are not traditional tributes or realist likenesses; they are apparitions, archetypes, psychological projections. Some are famous. Some are familiar only to me. All of them stand in for something larger: gender, glamour, power, vulnerability, collapse.

After years of working with acrylic on unprimed canvas—fast, raw, and immediate—I’ve turned to oil painting to go deeper, slower, and stranger. The medium slows me down in a way that makes me sit longer with the people I paint. They don’t feel like subjects. They feel like visitations.

Certain figures return again and again—Jackie, C.Z Guest, Babe Paley—not out of nostalgia, but compulsion. I revisit them the way you revisit a recurring dream, or a riddle you can’t quite solve. Repetition becomes its own kind of séance.

The painting decides when it's complete—I just listen.That might mean a background left undone, a face that dissolves at the edges, or a sketchlike looseness that resists completion. I trust that moment now. It tells me when to walk away.

I'm interested in collapsing time: the 1970s bleeding into the 1870s, the 20th century surfacing in a dream of the 21st. These works are part séance, part satire. I think of them as both love letters and interrogations. My goal is to create a space where image and identity are not fixed, but slippery—eroding, becoming, returning.

This is not nostalgia. It’s confrontation.