Blonde

Blonde (2022) is part of my Hand-Painted Photography Collection, a series where memory and myth collide through layered surface and reimagined portraiture. Painted in acrylic over photographic base, this 48 x 48 inch canvas explores identity not as fixed representation, but as a flickering impression.

The image — drawn from a photographic origin — is abstracted beyond recognition. Swaths of golden yellow, layered blushes, and a cascade of warm neutrals evoke the figure of a woman only partially visible, as if seen through time, longing, or forgetting. The edges are blurred. The story is open.

This painting plays with the archetype of the blonde — a figure historically burdened with idealization, desire, and erasure. Here, that identity is not celebrated or dismissed. It’s questioned, re-layered, made fluid. The surface becomes a meditation on how images are constructed — and how they begin to dissolve.

In spirit, Blonde finds kinship with the work of Marlene Dumas, whose paintings blur the line between figuration and abstraction, memory and emotion. Like Dumas, I’m not interested in portraiture as likeness. I’m interested in presence — in what haunts an image.

The result is sensual, ghostly, and immediate. You don’t see a person. You feel a trace. A suggestion. A gaze returned from a different lifetime.