ABOUT THE ARTIST
“I paint becoming. Not the destination, but every stage of the road, including the ones we keep coming back to.
Awakening, choosing, reclaiming, integrating, returning. Most of us are moving back and forth between these stages all the time. Sometimes called the messy middle. Not the before, not the after, but the long stretch of arriving.
I paint women in moments of becoming. They aren't who I am. They're who I'm reaching for. I figured this out slowly, by looking at what I'd already painted: I wasn't painting what I already felt. I was painting what I longed to feel. Freedom, strength, peace, sovereignty. Each figure is a future self, painted as a way of moving toward her.
I've been searching for myself my whole life. I dropped out of high school in ninth grade. I started over years later — community college, a four-year university, a PhD in social psychology, six years at Google as a UX researcher. Each version was the same question in different costumes: who am I, what does it mean to be human, what does it mean to be fully alive. From the outside, the PhD and the tech job looked like answers. Inside, I was waiting to die. Painting was the answer the entire time. I just couldn't hear it until I'd tried everything else I'd been told to try.
What broke through was a worksheet my therapist gave me on the floor of a 300-square-foot apartment — a list of about a hundred activities people do for pleasure, with instructions to circle anything I might enjoy. I scanned it and stopped on the word painting. A whole self I'd forgotten about came back online. For the next several years, I painted after work. I'd get off at five, exhausted, pick up a brush, and look up at eleven somehow restored. Time stopped when I painted. By early 2025, the math had become clear: the eleven-o'clock self was the real one. I went all in.
Some of what I'm reclaiming has been with me longer than I knew. Mu lao hu — female tiger — was what my family called me when I was too willful or too much. I painted two tigers before I remembered the name. I had been carrying it for thirty years.
I came up in a household that taught me to make myself smaller. The work is how I'm taking it back — not back to who I was, because that person was already shaped around what other people needed. Back to who I would have been without all of that. The willfulness, the size, the colors I'd been told were too much. I'm painting my way toward her. I don't know yet exactly who she is. The work keeps showing me.
This is for anyone in the same long stretch of figuring out who they are. The ones who left a path that looked good on paper. Who are still untangling messages they inherited. Who are figuring out which parts of themselves to keep.
I paint this journey because I'm still walking it. The searching is the thing I know best. I'm an artist because I finally let myself be one — and the work is still leading.
- Karen