Artist Statement
Cities of the World is a body of work that views a “city” not as a geography, but as psychological space. Seen from an aerial vantage point, each city painting is a record of movement, memory and self-positioning within an increasingly globalized world. These paintings are not maps meant to orient the viewer physically; they are emotional cartographies that ask where we locate ourselves internally when borders blur and scale expands.
This series emerged from earlier practices focused on a feeling of containment. My previous works have always explored identity and the “awe” of human being, initially through human portraits, but then I spent much time employing closed forms and rigid structures to express states of compression, limitation and internal pressure — internal states of being I felt. Over time, these forms began to strain against their boundaries. For example, in a later iteration of these works, “Windows,” created during the COVID pandemic, I connected rigid squares in space to symobolize and celebrate the desire for people on their balconies to connect in any way they could.
My shift to an aerial perspective in Cities marked a conceptual release: the frame opened outward, perspective lifted, and the work moved from interior confinement toward spatial and psychological freedom in addition to context — an understanding of oneself within a broader context and system and a feeling of belonging and interdependence. This perspective was a deliberate choice.. an artistic, visual and psychological shift… mirroring my personal growth and evolution as a woman and an artist….and my desire to express the emotions and feelings of what I view as my self-liberation related to that experience.
Painting cities from above introduces a position of distance and authority, but also of vulnerability. The aerial view has historically been associated with analysis and even surveillance or control, yet here it is reclaimed as a site of reflection, acceptance and beauty rather than documentation or dominance. Streets dissolve into rhythmic systems, grids soften into pulses, and infrastructure becomes gesture. The city is rendered as a living organism shaped as much by human desire and memory as by concrete and steel. While each painting’s title anchor the works to real locations, the paintings resist literal representation. Color, density and spatial tension are used to convey how a city feels rather than how it looks. Familiar urban forms become abstracted into patterns of movement, interruption and flow, allowing viewers to project their own experiences of belonging, displacement, ambition or anonymity onto the surface.
At its core, Cities of the World explores what it means to exist within systems that are vast, interconnected and often overwhelming. By removing the horizon and eliminating a single point of entry, the work mirrors the contemporary experience of navigating a world seen increasingly from above, through screens, data and distance. It is an inquiry into how place shapes identity when place itself becomes abstract. The paintings hold the tension between individuality and collectivity, intimacy and scale, freedom and dislocation, autonomy and reliance. In doing so, Cities asks a quiet but persistent question: How do we locate ourselves — and each other — when the world expands faster than our sense of home?