millions and billions
 

As a child I constantly was amazed by the faces I saw each day. I wondered how two eyes, a nose, mouth, and the shape of a head covered with hair – or by no hair at all – could create so many different faces. Millions and billions of them.

I grew up with a television detective’s certainty that no two fingerprints were alike. It was as clear to me that no two faces were alike. Even in the faces of identical twins, who share a startling sameness, there are intangibles; the way one’s jaw juts out, how the light behind the other’s eyes changes their color.

I watch faces. If you look, you will find something beautiful in each. Sometimes it’s the length of a neck, the shape of an earlobe, or how the lips curve up and communicate an inner sense of joy. It is always there. I see it. I feel it. 

For me, art is discovery: to encounter a face that makes me want to paint it and then find a way to translate with pigment the fleeting glimpse that lured me in; to hear a samba, and learn to play its sensual beat with a collage; or by anthropomorphizing the alphabet, uncover how the feats and frailties of humans can be found in each letter.

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

                                        RUMI

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