Blog / 2026 / Defining Prosperity

These two images are twenty years apart.

On the left: a 2006 artwork depicting different aspects of myself, wrapped around a tree so that the strip of portraits could be experienced as an endlessly repeating cycle.

On the right: a 2026 digital mock-up of part of a mural I’ll be painting later this summer.

Since my art career turned twenty in 2023, I’ve been thinking about my work with a two decade delay like this. In 2024, it led me to remake a self-portrait from 2004. In 2025, my 2005 William Hurt painting inspired me to start work on a series of celebrity portraits—a project which, I might add, still needs an institutional collaborator in case you know someone.

When I started looking back to 2006 at the beginning of 2026, I had trouble seeing a connection. Some of that is the times we live in. The violence and chaos of the current administration leave me struggling most days.

But some of it has to do with thing I was obsessing about 2006. That year alone, I painted men I met online in order to make a point about being a young female artist, and I created the first part of what would become a “before” and “after” series to help me understand what it means to be a woman. Even these two strips of portraits were rooted in the gender binary, as the titles Over Grown Up (Man) and Over Grown Up (Woman) make clear.

These artworks were my contribution to the group show inCLOVER, which was an outdoor art exhibit about being “in clover” or “living a carefree life of ease, comfort, or prosperity.”

My two portrait strips were created specifically for the show. They each contain embedded text that emphasizes the way society defines “prosperity” differently for women and men, while also exploring my then-new relationship with David, who’s still my sweetie.

Every one of the five portraits included in each strip had its own theme: overGROWN, grownUP, upSTART, startIN, inCLOVER. You can read all the text in the pieces here and here.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and I’m making paintings like this one, which is part of a preliminary design for a mural I’ll be painting in a few months in the reception area of an office.

In other words, in 2026, instead of painting portraits to be encountered among the trees in an exhibit about what a good life might be like, I’m painting the trees themselves as part of my very good life.

Things are hard: gas prices alone make everything more complicated, and that’s on top of all the personal stuff we all deal with in our lives. But in the last twenty years, I’ve figured out more and more about my gender identity, I’ve had my sweetie by my side the entire time, and I’ve had a multitude of gentle clients—including the one who’s commissioning this mural—supporting me and giving me opportunities to grow as an artist.

I am indeed in clover.