the image itself. Was there an event in your life that had a profound impact on you as an artist? The day over twenty years ago, when a very good-looking young man came walking past my house with his dog and no shirt. I thought about it for maybe three minutes, and then I jumped on my bike, and found him a few blocks away and asked if he would pose for some photographs. That was how my STUD/ DUST series began, which stayed as a photo series for some years, but eventually, I began to use the images to paint from as well— and that whole subject matter really took over my work.
and combat still get the most play. I think, though, with the broadening of women’s power and stature in society, not to mention the GLBT perspectives, there is an increase or willingness to see men’s more vulnerable and erotic side. While men have for centuries been idealised physically in art (think Michelangelo’s “David,”), I want the men in my work to at the same time remain approachable in an everyman sort of way— i.e. that you can aspire to some quality you are looking at or reading about in the artwork.
Where are you currently based and why? I grew up on the south side of Chicago and moved to Los Angeles after graduate school. I’d been a landscape painter before I met my husband, painter Wes that and was incorporating text and Hempel, there and after a few years, stories into it all as well. These days we decided to move to (and for years) the three idioms Colorado, since I had fallen in love have produced a very fruitful with the place during summer menage a trois. vacations as a kid, and I was ready to live in a more walkable city too. Do you think the male form will ever be commoditized as its We wound up in Boulder since female counterpart? we both love college towns, and I think men are commodified more we both wound up teaching at the and more these days, but the University of Colorado— though stereotypical approaches of sports not art, but writing. 89