MH

This is a picture that will be in my show Strangers (Gallery Kayafas, Boston, October 19 to November 24, 2012). I did most of the works in 2010, but this is one from the end of the summer. It combines incompatible emotions on one face--an angry eye and a sad one, in addition to other distortions of scale, perspective, and emotion. I think of them as non-portraits, since I think these pictures are just barely connected to their sitters. The people are almost unrecognizable. But I've come to think that they are connected even though they are greatly changed. I think this line of argument is called essentialism in philosophy