about

Hi, I'm Isabel.Thanks for looking at my website. Here's some information about me and my practice.

I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. I went to school in Chicago and am currently based here.

I like making paintings that have an immediate visual hit but are mysterious in their nature. It’s like the eye comprehends the painting quickly because of the information available: lights and darks and signs that are recognizable and a certain way that I’ve framed things, but what follows is a lack of information. A lack of understanding exactly what is being represented or why. I want there to be a magnetism that is extremely compelling but something about the painting is confusing, it’s adjacent to real life, it’s adjacent to simplicity. But it’s not that. It’s a painting. And the confusion leads the viewer back to his or herself and problems that need solving (wishes that need granting) in one’s own life— I’ll explain that later. I’m very superstitious, and without sounding corny, a pretty spiritual person. My painting practice is wrapped up in that. Particularly my process— I search for subject matter constantly. I take my own photo references, and I’ve learned over time you never quite know what is going to work and translate. There are plenty of times I see something, a door or window or something, that I think is magnificent and going to be great, and I get into the studio with my image and start drawing and it just doesn’t transfer. And then there are photos I took haphazardly that become very important paintings. Like the wreath/window/hole painting I just finished. Then I’ll get hungry for a new reference and go on walks and drives for hours searching. Those are the times when I seem to have the least luck finding anything I can work with. When I say spiritual… I had a funny experience recently that resulted in a small painting I just finished. I was driving east from my studio in Hermosa to a yoga class in Lincoln Park, driving down Diversey, it was around 6:30 in the evening. The sun was blazing across the buildings and I started to take notice and itch for something, even though any delay would probably make me late to my class. I was glancing around, left and right while driving and I finally saw something good. I pulled over into a tow zone and jumped out of my car. I got up close to what I wanted, it was a curved stone part of a frieze/column casting a shadow on the side of the entry. The light was hot and making the colors perfect. I took my photo and immediately after, the sunlight fell away. I got back into my car and as I drove across town the sky turned grey, and I drove into a cool fog rolling in from the lake. That just makes sense to me. It makes me feel like life is worth living, somehow.

I guess I’m hoping there’s a sense of that magic that carries into the painting and is perceptible to a viewer. It doesn’t need to be perceived in the same way I experienced it at all. But I want the painting to function as a kind of reflection of the more unconscious things that drive us. Take my painting of the circular window for example. There are lots of associations to be made with it, people were calling it a hole when they first saw it and I like that. It is a hole as much as it is a window, and a hole is a charged symbol and thing. There is taboo and dirtiness that goes with it, but also desire and the promise of another side, another world. Painting entryways and windows and portals offers an opportunity to project meaning and fantasy onto the paintings. What is beyond the thing is not depicted or known, hopefully the painting invites one to imagine that. What world would you like to be let into? I’m interested in entry and access and keys and key-holders. Why are there certain doors that some of us can’t walk through? Or can we? Can we change the properties of the door, can we find the key? What do we conceive is on the other side and what is really on the other side? It starts to get into, for me, issues of bureaucracy and the absurdity of rules that “must” be followed. These problems have bothered me for a long time and probably will continue to. I want to change the bounds of possibility and impossibility in my own life, and painting can absolutely do that.