Mother's Bedroom is an oil painting from a series called Precious (2008), which mostly depicted my single, childless women friends (myself included), borrowing other peoples' children and beautiful homes in order to enact Cassatt-esque scenes of domestic and maternal abundance. Sometimes when I was shooting (I use photos as reference, but I do all of the drawing freehand so that it retains some "feeling" or "magic" that gets lost when paintings approximate the still image too closely) I would get carried away observing the children. In this case, Makenzie, the daughter of my dear friends John and Amy Phelan, and her friend Tatiana, were having a sleep-over. I wanted to depict a privileged adolescence in which girls are exploring their feminine identity through make-up - something I would have longed for when I was their age (my mom never let me have make-up!).
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