The Girl in the Black and White Photograph

Acrylic on canvas.

36x36x875"

The Girl in the Black and White Photograph
I found her in an old black-and-white photograph.

I didn’t know her name, where she lived, or what became of her. There was something in her face that made me stop—a quietness, a distance, as if she were looking beyond the camera and into another life.

I began to wonder who she was.

So I took her out of the photograph and gave her color. I surrounded her with turquoise, black and white, pattern and movement, but I left her untouched—still belonging somehow to that photograph and the moment in which she was captured.

She is someone I never knew, from a story I will never completely know.

And maybe that is why I painted her.