I have always, perhaps foolishly, felt safe in the woods. A handful of years after graduating Montserrat College of Art with my BFA in painting I became a dog walker and so spent a great deal of time walking the many trails of New England. I grew to seek the calm walking in the woods brought me. It felt safe to believe I could find comfort in painting these woods I cherish so much and perhaps with these pieces, unlike my Flesh Series, I could bare to share space with them.

I’d recently finished a beautiful novel called The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell that often detailed its heroine painting over her past works. The circumstances between me and this character, of course, are quite different, but covering under-paintings is a practice easily accessible to an artist who needs to create. I also feel painting over old work can lend a sense of maturity, or at least, inform the new work that will be living on top of the old. As the artist, you need to discern “how do I work with what has already been given to me?” You have to work with the old to create the new. 

I found the old materials I used to depict the bumps on my face lent themselves seamlessly to the skin of a tree. Even in the small canvases where there are breaks between trees so as to not overstimulate the eye, the built up texture encourages the viewer to imagine a dense forest behind the lineup presented. 

It wasn’t until painting “Moss on Bark” when the clarity that I’ve been searching for in my work appeared. It was perhaps the loudest texture of the series. Creases, course texture, lumps and bumps galore. I realized the heavily worked canvas was determined to become a close-up depiction of a deliciously mossy tree. The moss twisting and slipping into the skin of a tree, just as my cystic acne acted on my own flesh. 

In these acrylic, abstracted, impressionist paintings, I am covering my cystic, bruised and scared skin with that of another living thing, often with its own parade of interlopers on its flesh. With all their simple imperfections, these trees helped me turn my past work into something more realized. A layer of human shame hidden beneath yet providing so much to nature and its unabashed pride. The tarnished flesh becomes the beauty of the bark, the landscape, the light. The Viewer doesn’t necessarily need to know my journey, or about the under-paintings of red and pink splotches with built up bumps, to appreciate the recognizable painting that lives on the surface- but that is where they come from. Creating these tree-scapes was my excursion of power to look back at a time when I was deeply unhappy in my skin and morph it into the new life I also created. To confront and accept the girl who painted the old work and invite her to have a say in my current, happier life. A life filled with countless precious moments spent outside, breathing in the woods with my daughter. To let go of the despair and self-obsession imbedded previously and insist upon tranquility and hope, feelings that are immensely important to a new parent.

And so, like the Greek nymph Daphne, my flesh became bark.