During a trip to Venice, I felt a powerful attraction growing within me for the drapery depicted in the paintings of the great masters. Countless Renaissance canvases place them side by side with bodies.

The fabric seems to reveal as much as it conceals. It sometimes carries a subtle intention through its shape, its fall, its color - almost stealing the spotlight from its subject by the sheer force of its presence. Yet, in the same silence, it seems to speak on behalf of the body. I find myself dreaming of giving in to the urge to dive into it - to step into the canvas- to become the subject myself.

So I begin to paint canvases like draperies. I step inside them, take them along on my travels to photograph them in unexpected places, and create portraits of my loved ones within them. I see in them a repeated motif capable of instantly illuminating the person or space that wears it.

To transform reality into a painting. Like a second skin over our own, or like a cast-off shell left at our feet, these canvases tell of our relationship to the body, its metamorphosis, its connection to time.