I have a folder on my phone with photographs of old work. Not for nostalgia — for honesty. I look at it when I am feeling too settled, too sure of my own voice. It is a useful kind of humbling.
In the earliest images, everything is cautious. The colours stay within permission. The compositions follow the rules I was taught, obedient to a logic that was not yet mine. I can see myself there, working hard to become something.
Further along, something loosens. The palette gets louder. The figures start to break apart and reassemble. You can see the moment I stopped asking for approval from an imagined audience.
Every self we shed leaves a mark. A style abandoned. A way of speaking retired. A version of our face that no longer fits.
Portraiture has always interested me because the face is where identity is most legible — and most deceptive. We read each other by faces. But faces change. The face you wore at twenty is not the face you carry now. Growth is partly grief: you leave versions of yourself behind.
The series I called The Faces We Outgrow was an attempt to make that process visible. I painted overlapping portraits — the same figure at different registers of becoming, their features layered and translucent, each era of self showing through the next like sediment.
What struck me in making it was how much love I felt for the earlier faces. Not longing — love. The compassion you extend to someone who was trying their best with incomplete information. Which is what we all are, always, until we are not anymore.
I think that is what art does at its best: it slows time enough for you to be present with your own becoming. To look at who you were and who you are becoming without flinching away from either.
