CliffKate Enters the Permanent Collection

I’m very happy to share that CliffKate, a 36 × 48-inch oil painting, has been selected for the permanent collection of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. This is a first for me, and I have to admit, seeing one of my paintings become part of a museum’s permanent collection feels pretty damn good.

CliffKate is a portrait of a husband and wife, but it isn't really about making two portraits. The painting grew out of my ongoing interest in identity, relationships, and the ways we become intertwined with the people we share our lives with.

I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens to identity when we stop thinking of ourselves as entirely separate people. We spend a great deal of our lives presenting different versions of ourselves, depending on where we are, who we're with, and what is expected of us. But underneath all of that is the more complicated question of what remains when those layers begin to fall away.

In CliffKate, I wanted to explore that space between two people. Where does one person end and another begin? What gets absorbed, borrowed, changed, or lost through a relationship? The two figures are deliberately merged, allowing the portrait to move somewhere between individual identity and shared identity.

The painting is part of a larger direction my portrait work has been taking, one that is less interested in simply capturing what someone looks like and more interested in what a portrait might reveal about how we understand ourselves.

Knowing that CliffKate will remain in my community as part of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s permanent collection is deeply meaningful to me. Paintings have a funny way of leaving the studio and developing lives of their own, and I can't think of a better place for this one to continue its life.

I’m grateful to the museum for recognizing the work, and to everyone who has encouraged me to keep pushing, questioning, and painting my way through these ideas. It’s a pretty wonderful thing to make something, send it out into the world, and discover that it has found a place to stay.