Desiree

The portraits of “Desiree” combined eroticism with horror to illuminate man's desire and fear of women. The painting concerns the psychological and physical violence directly and indirectly inflicted to sex workers and disenfranchised women-- when they are seen as sexual objects. The tongue is the symbol in which I imply the Hindu Goddess Kali as a metaphor of the all consuming aspect of reality for these sex goddesses, women who live among us as shadowy figures deprived of identities, and many are victims of the brutal enterprise of human merchandise, often used up and forgotten within a few years.

Desiree began with a successive layers of colors freely applied with brushes, scratched off, and again painted over to create a varied translucency of hues on thickened layers of pigments. Pallet knives loaded with pigment were used to create a raised body of lines, which results in a repoussè effect that accentuate reflective light and shadow over the translucent texture, and embedded the two dimensional plane with a multi-layered surface. This technique resembles a conversion of abstraction, op art and realism.