… in which palette percipitates new perception in Paris
These sketches are an exploration of color and technique as I develop my next body of work. Some elements carry forward from my Partisan series—particularly the softly rendered, almost blurred approach to portraiture, the use of a restrained color palette, and the sourcing of reference images from film.
I often joke that I use film stills as reference because I’m not a photographer—and in film, the lighting is already perfect. But there’s more to it than convenience. I’m drawn to images that feel like they come from the collective imagination—if such a thing exists.
When selecting reference material, I intentionally avoid films I’ve seen before. This allows for greater interpretive freedom; I’m not tied to any existing narrative or character development. This distance is also why I never aim for a “true” or “accurate” portrait. If the reference comes from a film I haven’t watched, then who, exactly, is the subject I’m rendering? The actor? The character? Or the actor performing the character? These distinctions don’t interest me—they feel beside the point.
What matters is the imaginative structure the image provides—a kind of framework onto which I can map my own ideas. In this way, I’m engaging with a shared visual language, rather than projecting my concepts onto a specific individual like a friend, model, or family member. The film still already exists as a fragment of imagined reality, which aligns more closely with my intention.
Ultimately, the figures in my work are less about representing real people and more about embodying ideas. As I explore the nature of people and cognition through painting, this deliberately ambiguous approach feels the most honest.
Working with these new color relationships has opened up fresh possibilities, and through this experimentation, I’ve arrived at a new palette that I’ll be carrying into the next series. Stay tuned for more on that in an upcoming post!
