Paper Dolls, 2025

a series of original paintings which embrace the inadequacies of human reproduction as

compositional elements to the point of aesthetic appeal and scarcity.

“Why don’t you make prints of your paintings so everyone can own them?”

I was on the fence about turning my originals into affordable reproductions. As a proverbial ‘starving artist’, making prints could potentially earn me a small but arguably more regular income simply by expanding my market demographic to include those who don’t necessarily have disposable incomes. Somehow my thoughts lingered on this in a negative light, since producing artworks that are inexpensive enough for everyone to own also makes it easy for everyone to discard, and the idea of my creative efforts ending up in landfill was deterrent enough to counter-answer this question of prints with a series of original works that visually mimic the print process with hand-copied, almost Trompe-l'œil image stacks. The copies are all original, imperfect, particularly labour-intensive, and are used as compositional elements to create value in the form of

“Artist as an imperfect yet diligent production line”, no matter how many people want or can afford it, nor how often the artist’s hand attempts to faithfully reproduce it.