Charles Froelick reviewed my portfolio before I had even finished school. It was seeing my portraits through his eyes that gave me the first hint at the work I would need to be doing.
Simply put, portraiture is not usually interesting to anyone who does not know the subject of the portrait (intimately or otherwise). This realization was the genesis of all my conceptual shows, including the first, Critics Critiqued, in which Froelick participated. I theorized that if I gathered faces around a theme, the unknown people became somewhat known to the viewer and therefore more interesting. For example, in 2007, I created Swollen, a series of "before" and "after" portraits of eight unknown women who were going through major physical transitions. Though the subjects are not celebrities, the portraits of these women interested viewers because of the stories surrounding them and because of the different facets of womanhood that each of the subjects represented.

To learn more about the making of Critics Critiqued, please visit my blog.