Painting is part of my professional life.  I have two careers.  I have psychology and I have art.  I have to keep two careers right now, because I can’t make enough money in art to give up psychology just yet.  But my hope is to be able to just paint and draw.  The hard thing is painting is like anything else - the more you do it, the better you are at it.  I can tell the difference between people who paint once a month and people who paint and draw all the time.  You really do need to be immersed in it, but if you can’t eat from it, you have to do other things.  The problem is other things can actually interfere with your ability to do art.  To get around that, I’m considering teaching art, but regardless of whether I teach, I still want to become immersed in art.

Why that is, who can say?  I don’t know if anybody really knows what makes them do what they want to do.  I think a lot is pre-determined.  In psychoanalysis, one of the theories about art and creativity is that a certain omnipotence is achieved by making something.  An artist can deal with issues like loss by recreating, or bringing back on some level, that which was lost.  There’s no question, there’s something totally magical about creating.

I imagine artists have all kinds of unconscious motivations, but what’s fascinating in my case is I did not start painting until after I experienced my first major death, which was the loss of my father.  About three years after his death, I had an inner urge to draw and paint.  There was something calling from within, and I obeyed that calling. 

Around that time, I was also becoming a psychoanalyst.  I graduated from the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1994.  I was in psychoanalysis, as part of my studies.  As I began analysis of my defenses,  I became less afraid of my feelings, and more open to receive, explore and communicate impressions of the world.

I definitely think the loss of my father must have played a huge role in all of that, because one of the first things I drew was a picture of him.  But, then again, I’ve never had children, so that might be part of it as well.  All my paintings are my children.

How has your interest in painting and your paintings evolved?

That was easier to do because my grandmother was an excellent seamstress, on my mother’s side, and on my father’s side, his brother was a tailor, so there were people to tap that potential.  With sewing, I had all the things that I like about painting.  For example, I like beautiful colors, fabrics and all that.  I just didn’t know that there might be something more universal underlying those interests.

How did you gain the confidence to begin showing and selling your art professionally?

After four years, I decided that that was enough class work, and I began working on my own.  I knew it was important to produce successful paintings, and to try to have shows.  I’m organized to achieve the end goal. And, like anything else, when you have colleagues and you see them grow - and you see the people who are a little ahead of you have shows - they inspire you to want to have your own show.  When you are learning art, I think it’s very important to surround yourself with other students or people who are doing art, to see how it all develops and unfolds, just as students do in medicine or psychology.

That’s Georgia.  She was in her early 70s when she posed for the painting, back in the summer of 2001.  She use to pose as a model for the Art League School, that's where I first met her, when I was a student there.

I asked her to model for me when I began working on my own.  I did the same with Russell, the man in the painting next to hers.  (See image above).  He was an acrobat.  They were both my favorite models.

Do you see what Georgia is holding in her lap?  It's the head of Medusa.  She made it out of dryer lint.  I thought that was so creative.  Instead of just painting her, I asked her to put a piece of herself into the pose.  She made the Medusa head shortly before she agreed to pose for me.

Georgia had an interesting life.  She studied art when she was in junior high school and high school.  When she got married and had kids, she stopped pursuing art and focused on her family.  After the kids were grown and off having kids of their own, she re-engaged with art, both by modeling and by doing her own work.  She was a very popular model, and everyone loved to draw and paint her.

She was able to attend the opening of the first showing of that painting, and I'm glad because she died of cancer 15 months after I finished that painting.  She was as steadfast and bold in death as she was in life.  She concluded that the quality of her life wouldn't be good if she took a lot of medication or allowed the doctors to do experimental things.  So, she decided to just deal with the diagnosis, and quietly passed away.

She was absolutely wonderful.  She once told me that one of her art teachers was Meta Warrick Fuller, a giant of the Harlem Renaissance, and a wonderful sculptor.

A lot of people have a strong reaction to that painting.  No matter what color they are, they all feel as though she's their grandmother.

As I look at your portraits, I sense their essence.  How do you go about capturing the essence of your subjects?  Where do you begin?

I start by setting up a painting compositionally, and as I do, I am most concerned with what will appeal to the eye.   I wrestle with where to locate the figure and what size it needs to be in order to be interesting in relationship to the canvas.

It's determined pretty much by how big I want to paint.  I have some sense of whether I want a large painting, or not.  In general, I think the larger the painting, the more pleasing it is to the eye.  If you paint a figure about the size of a real figure, the eye is going to be pleased.  With a small painting, you really have to go over and see it.  You don’t see it as well from far away.  We tend to like life-size things, I think.

It’s not; but no matter how much experience you have or don't have with art, the eye knows good art.  At my home, I have my own paintings, paintings by peers, and a painting by the man who taught me to paint, Rick Weaver.  When people see his painting, they ask whether I did it, and that always amazes me.  They know intuitively that it’s not mine.  It’s not because our styles are so different.  They’re just picking up on the magnificence of his painting.  The eye knows when the artist has done his or her job in pleasing what the eye wants.  I’m talking just in terms of the arrangement.  I’m not addressing things like color, where we all have our little preferences.  Some people are drawn to bold colors, while others find that disturbing and prefer more neutral colors.  But the eye’s response to the actual composition and arrangement is pretty much pre-determined, I think.

You also use light to accentuate the face.

Light is important.  It helps me to draw.  It’s going to fall on the face based on the subject's bone structure.  If you follow the light and the shadow, you draw more accurately.

Do you employ the same process when you work with inanimate objects?

There are some basic rules, things you don’t do if you want to make a figure interesting.  For example, it can look really awkward if you stop a pose in certain places.  There are certain things you come to know, but beyond that, I worry about the same things with a still life as I do with a figure.  I want to make sure the eye goes to the focal point, and travels around the canvas the way I want it to. 

That’s me.  I have a witch's hat on and I’m scaring Dorothy (laughs).  Seriously, that’s a doll study, and I’m going to do a whole series of doll studies where I bring myself into the paintings.  In this one, I’m invading the doll space, which is what we do as kids, only not that dramatically.  But that’s what little girls do.  They invade the space of their dolls.  They project their feelings and wishes into the doll.

I am definitely interested in the theme of the witch.  Part of that has to do with working out my own evilness, but part of it also has to do with a struggle I was having with my students.  I teach at George Washington University, and I think students are so different today.  They cannot tolerate feedback.  You give them feedback and you become the Wicked Witch of the West.  I also think there’s a racial component to it.  There’s a tendency for my students to experience me as mean and intimidating, no matter how I give the feedback.  I think there’s transference going on there.  They're not use to having a Black female instructor and I think that I’m being stereotyped in their minds.  In the witch  painting, I struggled with that.  It was a painful experience.  It got to the point where I was scared to give any feedback because I felt that they would interpret it as hateful.  I’ve been able to work through that with them, but I still want to work with the theme of the witch.

The doll series won’t deal exclusively with the witch, but they will all deal with me invading the inner space of dolls.

I do.  I have some wonderful dolls that I’ve been collecting over the last six or seven years.  One of my favorite dolls is my mammy doll.  Now, don’t ask me why I as a Black woman would be nostalgic for a mammy doll, but I am.  In one of my paintings, I'm psychoanalyzing mammy as she psychoanalyzes a White man.  In another painting, I have mammy walking across Freud’s rug – the famous one under his psychoanalysis coach.  Mammy is carrying a chair on her head.  What does it mean?  Mammy’s free, but she can’t figure out that the chair is for sitting, so she’s still carrying that burden on her back.  She needs analysis.  She’s going to walk across that rug, and when she gets to the other side, she’s going to know that the chair is for sitting.

I also have a painting of mammy with a baby in one arm, a broom in hand, and with the other hand, mammy is ironing an endless piece of cloth.  On top of that, she’s trying to raise her daughter to have ambition and goals.  Mammy has a big job, but she’s determined to raise a star.