Portraits: of Love and Legacy

Portraiture is another way I explore the relationship between memory, identity, place, and the passage of time. Where my cartography paintings preserve the landscapes that shape our lives, my portraits turn toward the people who give those places meaning.

I am especially drawn to moments of transition: an engagement beginning a shared future, a wedding marking the joining of two lives, or the arrival of a newborn quietly changing the shape of a family. These are moments we return to years later. Through portraiture, I seek to preserve more than a likeness. I consider gesture, expression, light, color, atmosphere, and the small details that hold the feeling of a particular season of life.

My approach has developed across mediums and stages of my own artistic practice. Buehler Twins (2015), rendered in charcoal on paper, uses the simplicity of line, shadow, and value to study the relationship between two siblings. Guevara (2026), painted in oil on canvas, brings portrait and landscape together, preserving both the couple and the setting surrounding an important moment in their story. My Self Portrait (2015), created in acrylic on paper, and earlier Self Portrait (2013), painted in oil on canvas, explore identity from a more intimate perspective and document my own changing relationship with self and artistic expression.

Together, these works reflect the same question that runs throughout CLR Creations: What do we carry with us?

Sometimes it is a landscape. Sometimes it is a journey. Sometimes it is the face of someone we love.

A commissioned portrait becomes a physical record of that connection, created slowly by hand and intended to remain with a family as the years surrounding it change. Engagements, weddings, and newborns offer particularly meaningful opportunities to create these heirlooms, preserving the beginning of stories that may be carried for generations.