Curly Horse centers on the rare Bashkir Curly Horse, using its distinctive coat as a formal anchor. The horse’s curls become an exploration of line in flux rendered as expressive marks that emphasize an abstracted shape and form. Painted blue, the figure embodies a calm, cool demeanor, grounding the composition in steadiness.

A cat pelt adorns the horse’s body, functioning as a symbol of independence and self-possession. Rather than implying dominance, it suggests a quiet mastery and an alignment with autonomy and instinct.

The background directly nods to George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, referencing its pale, open field and riderless presentation. Like Stubbs’s celebrated painting at the London National Gallery, Curly Horse removes narrative distractions, no rider and no setting, allowing the animal’s body to exist as its own subject. This compositional choice frames the horse as an embodiment of natural presence and inner life.

Nature Study is the first in my hare studies, bringing together the symbolic language of the hare with the thematic influence of Louise Bourgeois’s Nature Study. Bourgeois’s work examines nurturing, gender, identity, and mortality, and this painting extends those concerns through a quieter, more elusive figure.

The hare functions as a liminal presence, an animal most often seen at dawn or dusk, appearing briefly at the edge of perception before disappearing again. Its alertness, speed, and transitional habits become a metaphor for moments that are felt more than clearly observed: emotional states, thresholds of identity, and fleeting experiences of care or vulnerability. The hare’s body carries tension between softness and vigilance, nurture and survival.

Within this context, the symbolistic body of the She-Wolf, associated with mercy, protection, and the mythic nurturing of Western expansion, is intentionally displaced. That maternal symbolism is transferred to the hare, a less fierce and more concealed animal. By doing so, Nature Study reframes ideas of motherhood and care away from dominance or power and toward attentiveness, fragility, and quiet endurance.

An Argument presents a skeleton seated at a restaurant table, leaning forward as if already in preemptive conversation. A glass of water and menu sit within its dominion, while a plate of shared bread rests slightly off to the side. The scene suggests the moment just before a difficult exchange, where presence and absence are held in the same space.

The painting continues the motif first explored in Structure + Emotion, a block print that considers the tension between emotional processing and rigid self-control, and later revisited in the collage Memento Mori, which layered that imagery with Metamorphosis to reflect on the importance of confronting emotion sooner rather than later in order to be at peace.

In An Argument, the skeleton returns as a figure of stark honesty. Seated at a place meant for nourishment and shared experience, it embodies the stripped-down reality beneath polite social rituals. Bread, water, and the table setting evoke care and sustenance, yet the skeletal figure suggests the lack or inessential of both.

Through this quiet, somewhat humorous scene, the work reflects on how structure, rigidity, and nourishment intersect.

Spotted Horse presents a calm and attentive figure, its demeanor cool and sensitive. Small passages of pink soften the body, drawing attention to delicate areas of flesh and emphasizing vulnerability within strength. Draped across the horse’s back is a tiger pelt, functioning as an emblem of past battles and hard-won resilience.

Cadmium red outlines trace the contours of the horse, separating the body from a rising field of flame in the background. The contrast between composure and heat creates a tension between steadiness and the escalating pressures surrounding it.

The painting reflects on the need to build skill, awareness, and inner control while navigating an increasingly hostile political climate toward the transgender community. In this context, the horse becomes a figure of practiced grace—holding sensitivity and vulnerability while remaining grounded, disciplined, and prepared to move forward through danger.

Tiresias draws from the Greek myth of the oracle Tiresias, a figure whose life includes a transformative shift in sex and perspective. In the story, Tiresias strikes a pair of copulating snakes, killing the female and resulting in being transformed into a woman for seven years. During this time, Tiresias lives as a priestess of Hera, marrying and having children before eventually returning again to life as a man.

The painting centers on the moment symbolized by the loss of the female snake. The paired snakes become an image of rupture and change, echoing the myth’s longstanding resonance as a trans-coded narrative about shifting embodiment and lived experience across sex and gender.

Figs appear throughout the composition, referencing a favorite foraged fruit found in abundance in Baltimore. Their presence introduces a note of nourishment and locality, grounding the mythic imagery in a immediate landscape. The sky above is rendered in shifting, multi-colored tones that reflect across the scales of the snakes, inspired by the expressive color mark-making of Cuno Amiet.

A darker cloud lingers in the corner of the image, signaling the inevitability of change. Within the painting, transformation is a mythological fate and a lived condition as an unfolding moment where identity, environment, and story combined.

The Bather presents a nude blue horse resting within a natural landscape, its body draped across a red tiger pelt. The horse’s back faces the viewer, with its anatomy fully visible, positioning the body as both subject and object of observation. The calm posture and saturated color emphasize the form of the body against the surrounding environment.

The painting draws from the long tradition of bather motifs in nineteenth-century European painting, where the act of bathing or resting nude in nature often became a stage for the dynamics of the male gaze. In particular, the work references Le déjeuner sur l’herbe by Édouard Manet, where two nude women sit among fully dressed men, highlighting the tension between exposure, spectatorship, and social power.

By replacing the female figure with an animal, The Bather redirects attention away from sexualized objectification and toward the classical appreciation of anatomy, posture, and presence. The horse’s body becomes a stand-in for the tradition of the reclining nude while softening the dynamics of voyeurism. In doing so, the painting reflects on how bodies are witnessed in art history while offering a quieter meditation on form, vulnerability, and the beauty of embodied life within nature.

Garden Hare brings together threads from earlier works, continuing the symbolic language of Fire Hare and Nature Study. In this painting, the hare moves through a garden at dawn, a moment of transition where night gives way to day. As in previous hare imagery, the animal exists at the edge of perception, embodying the liminal quality of moments that are felt before they are fully seen.

The work is also informed by the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, whose wish is to become real through love and experience.  As the hare runs through the garden, sunlight passes through its body, illuminating the redness of the flesh beneath the surface.  This narrative resonates as a trans-coded metaphor for the desire to become and be perceived as what one knows internally to be true.