In this self-portrait, a girl holds a honeycomb with bees advancing up to her ear. This work’s title is sourced from a Cranach painting that is an allegory for love. Venus chides a young cupid for going after the honey, because if you go after the honey you are going to get stung. I am both cupid, adventurous and naive, and Venus, responsible for my own decisions, yet miserable from their consequences.

This is a traditional theme in painting that combines death and sexuality. The roots of this go back to ancient Greece with the abduction of Persephone into Hades. Rather than portray death and the maiden as two separate entities, I have combined a funerary pose on the cold blue flesh of a young woman. She lies amid peacock feathers and green plants yet she is beyond the warm blush of life. The eyes that are across her face are from “Our Man of Sorrow” depicting Christ in agony.

In the Collection of Larry and Barbara Stapleton

This is self-portrait of a bizarre surgery with my head on Mantegna’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ. I consider this work to be metaphorically autobiographical. A hyperbolic statement about a real sensation that is complex and nearly incomprehensible without explanation. This is an act of hyperbolic, self-martyrdom; I am sacrificing my potential motherhood so I may maintain a more masculine role as a painter-creator.

This is the melodramatic, histrionic view of self-portrait as a dead man. Not just any man, but CHRIST. Is this too strong a statement? Why do I feel like a martyr? Self-martyrdom because I have, in great sorrow (…and here I am wearing an eye mask of Christ’s eyes) I have quite nearly given up on fulfilling my destiny to be a mother for that destiny of being a painter. As a woman, I perceive myself as not alive or functioning for lack of fulfilling my role as mother or vaginal creator. I have let part of myself, my body's destiny… go unfulfilled. Exploring the de-feminization that occurs when a woman choices her career over the decision to have a child, I have painted myself as a man. As a painter who is attempting to "make it", one creates constantly and is unable to keep her progeny.

The word hysterical comes from "of the womb," from Gk. Hysterikos "of the womb, suffering in the womb," from hystera "womb" (see uterus). Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Hysterics is 1727; hysteria, abstract noun, formed 1801.

So the Greeks believed that the womb, or uterus, would detach and wander around the body causing a woman to go nuts. What's funnier is that often dildos were prescribed to alleviate the symptoms. Thus, this is why a hysterectomy and hysteria have the same root. Unhappy womb + insanity = lack of sex. So a hysterical pregnancy is nothing more than a phantom pregnancy or an imagined state of thinking one is pregnant, but I think the WHOLE story of the etymology of hysteria is essential to understanding the bigger issue.

I like to see the pictorial plane here as a surgeon’s theater with fairy midwives holding medieval surgeons tools to enable the removal this child… it was weeks into painting this painting that I thought, hmmm maybe I have this wrong. Perhaps they are impregnating the body with a phantom baby. So whichever the case maybe, there is a central figure in a despondent state of narcotically or ennui induced hallucinations that have manifested into the primitive flying creatures on the ceiling. This painting will never sell and I am really hoping to be the owner of it one day.

A lady looks wistfully at the beauty of a perfect rose while her enormous 18th-century hairdo is overcome by a world of conflicts. In the style of Gone With the Wind or Anna Karenina, this damsel has gone after her ideals only to participate in her own self-destruction.

In the collection of Larry and Barbara Stapleton

A regal female holds the decapitated head of a mature male while a figure of death sits at her shoulder lecturing her as her conscience. The stories of Judith and Holofernes and Salome and John the Baptist are combined in this image of female power and it’s fatal consequences.