Title: Yellow Hat with Old Tiles (Self Portrait)

Artist’s Statement: 

In this self-portrait, I invite the viewer to join me as a fellow tourist on an oppressively hot day in Porto, Portugal. The painting captures the sensation of getting lost among cobblestone streets, turning a corner, and stumbling upon unexpected beauty. The weathered ocher and rust-colored tiles, sun baked and clinging to the façade of a Brutalist apartment building. Beneath it all runs the inescapable undercurrent of crushing summer heat. I want the viewer to feel the weight of that heat—the moment when sun and stone overwhelm the body, and identity itself seems to blur and dissolve.

I built the image on a cradle wood panel, layering acrylic washes, grout medium, and varnish to replicate the grime, depth, and reflective surface of the tiles. I then completed the actual portrait in oil paint using traditional, delicate brush strokes for the face and hat. I aimed to create a tension in the mood of the painting by using thick, gooey paint to depict the t-shirt in a semi-abstract manner. The interplay of realism and abstraction embodies the dissonance of the moment. 

My hope is that the viewer experiences not only the visual harmony between the yellow hat and the sun-soaked tiles, but also feels as though they're standing in Portugal with me where the heat radiating from the tiled wall is melting your clothes into you. It was a day so hot that the boundaries between body, clothing, and environment distort and converge to create the inspiration for this painting.