The Women Behind the Paintings: Inspiration for the Whimsical Portrait Series
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Every painting starts somewhere. For the Whimsical Portrait Series, it started with a stack of old photographs — black and white snapshots of women I'll never know, but couldn't stop thinking about.
I've always been drawn to vintage photographs. There's something quietly compelling about them — a face caught in a moment, a hat tilted just so, an expression that holds a whole story you can only imagine. Who were these women? What were they thinking? What color was that coat?
From Photograph to Painting
For this series, I began with 16 vintage black and white photos as my starting point. Each one was a stranger — a real person from another era, preserved in silver and shadow. I studied their faces, their posture, the way they held themselves in front of the camera.
Then I let my imagination take over.
I gave each woman my own interpretation of her expression — sometimes wistful, sometimes bold, sometimes quietly amused. And for the details I couldn't know — the color of a blouse, the pattern on a background, the warmth of a scarf — I invented freely. The result is something between portrait and fiction: rooted in a real face, but reimagined in color and feeling.
The Paintings Are Totally Different — and That's the Point
If you placed the original photographs next to the finished paintings, you might not immediately see the connection. The colors are vivid and layered. The backgrounds are patterned and expressive. The women have been reinterpreted through my own artistic lens.
That's exactly what I hoped for. These aren't copies or colorizations — they're conversations. A way of honoring these unknown women by imagining them anew, giving them color and life and a little whimsy.
The series includes 16 paintings, each one a 6 x 8 original on canvas. Each woman has a name — Birdie, Bernice, Clara, Clementine, and more — names I chose to give them an identity, a presence, a sense that they matter.
Because they do.
If you've ever paused over an old photograph and wondered about the person in it, I think you'll understand exactly what drew me to this series.
p.s. These make perfect gifts.