My painting Marguerite is currently on view in the juried exhibition CHROMA:Vol2 at White Rabbit Galleries in Barberton, Ohio.
There’s a moment when you see your own work in a space that isn’t your studio—something shifts. It breathes differently. And Marguerite did just that for me. It was so exciting to see her, especially that bold yellow background, under the gallery lights.
A technique I used on Marguerite—which is part of my ongoing series Promising Mad Women—is one I’ve been experimenting with across the collection: layering quilter’s chalk beneath paint to build a textured, shifting background. It’s a nod to the unseen labor of “women’s work”—often delicate, always structural, sometimes invisible once the final piece is done. The chalk leaves soft ridges and ghost lines that dip in and out of view depending on how the light hits or where you’re standing.
That subtle shifting of visibility feels important. Especially in a show about color and what catches the eye. Marguerite grabs your attention and then asks for a slower look. I love the something that hums beneath her surface.
Marguerite is a woman suspended in a moment of ambiguous offering. Dressed in a soft pink gown, she extends a single cabbage rose toward a headless paper doll. The faceless figure echoes a refined society that both desires and discards Marguerite. Behind them, that bright yellow backdrop radiates a charged intensity. The color sets a mood of fevered urgency and bold defiance. My favorite part is that the scene vibrates with contradictions: intimacy and distance, elegance and erasure, fragility and flamboyance. Marguerite is a confrontation in disguise—a moment of feminine grace weaponized against the forces that seek to consume and forget her.
Standing beside Doug and Alice during the opening made the moment of seeing her on the wall even sweeter. It’s one thing to make a painting. It’s another thing to actually view it in a gallery, standing by your people, in a public space that celebrates self-expression.
This is the heartbeat of Promising Mad Women: giving visual form to layered experiences, emotional contradictions, inherited expectations, and the quiet power of showing up as you are—even (especially) when you’re not fully visible to everyone.
CHROMA:Vol2 at White Rabbit Galleries is on view through October 25. The show itself is full of cool work by other artists who are pushing color, form, and feeling in unexpected directions. It’s worth a visit if you’re nearby—and so is Barberton. Hop (ha, white rabbit, get it?) a few storefronts over to Aunt Hannah’s Antiques while you’re there. So many visual goodies there too.
