Girl with Yellow Braids 2009

I think this is a self portrait, but I'm not absolutely sure.  I have a school picture of myself from when I was in the second or third grade:  the standard mother's bowl cut bangs, braids on either side of my head, blond.  So there is that memory, but none of the photos in this image are of me.  The right eye and the mouth are my older daughters, but I'm not sure of the origin of the other body parts, the ear, the nose, and the other eye. The chest and neck are from a pile of sticks under a beautiful oak tree in front of my residence in Roanoke, Virginia at Hollins College when I was there in 2008.

When I made this piece I was trying to figure out how to use the luscious scraps of painted paper that I had in my pile of things I'd made but didn't quite know what to do with, which is actually what all my piles of things in the studio are.  The background painting was a small panel with many layers of paint, and it also was something that I felt compelled to do something with-it was just so lovely. When I finished the piece, I was pleased, feeling that it captured something very simple and honest.  It was only today, when I looked at the piece and immediately thought of that small school picture from so long ago, that I realized it was most probably a self-portrait of 7 year old Holly.