Cinematic Nostalgia:

Ode to the Femme

Since childhood, I have been captivated by the glamorous, highly stylized women in classic films—their beauty, fashion, makeup, lighting, and the artifice that makes them seem almost larger than life. That fascination has followed me through my creative life, from my drag career in the 1990s to my work as a makeup artist in the 2000s in Hollywood…and now into painting.

These paintings are not recreations of particular films. They are imagined encounters with a familiar visual language where cinema, memory, femininity, and fantasy overlap. In this series, I also began exploring AI as a tool for developing some of my reference material, not as a replacement to creating this imagery, but as another way of entering that imaginative space and transforming it through my own eye, sensibility, and hand.

Below are the first three paintings from this series.

THE BOND GIRL

2025, Oil on Paper, 16 x 12 inches

THE BLAXPLOITATION QUEEN

2026, Oil on Paper, 12 x 12 inches

LA FILLE FRANÇAISE

2026, Oil on Paper, 12 x 16 inches