These works are part of a series for my July 2025 MFA exhibition, A Strange and Generous Kindness. Referencing Christian icons of Christ and saints’ hands, these paintings celebrate the longevity and vitality of their witness as signs of God’s loving presence, incarnations of His tender care and messages of good news. These sacred motifs, such as Rublev’s Trinity and imagery of Mary holding Christ after His crucifixion, are transposed through collage, décollage and an expressionist visual vernacular. The aesthetic stylization echoes the encrusted strata of posters and tag paint roller cover ups found in the urban landscape.

The surface of the painting becomes a palimpsest, yielding an archeological quality, as the icons hands are concealed and revealed simultaneously through excavated layers of newspaper, magazine, found materials and the photocopied pages of the writings of mystic saints, such as Julian of Norwich and Simone Weil.

Situated in conversation with punk and postmodern culture, this work explores afresh the ways in which Benediction meets us right where we are—particularly the thresholds of pain and possibility, and the spaces we inhabit between deconstruction and reorientation on our journey of becoming.

[] Mixed media: acrylic paint, spray paint, graphite, colored pencil, glitter, gold leaf, newspaper, magazine and cardstock paper []