KM and Coffee

Earlier this year, I was sitting in a coffee shop with a friend when I noticed a woman across the room. I saw her from behind. Her hair was gathered into a loose bun at the nape of her neck and it was a glorious silver-gray. Her hair was magnificent, but it was the way she occupied space that really caught my attention. There was something really powerful in her strance.

Shades of Grey found at Shades of Brown .

I walked over, intending to introduce myself and offer a card to see if she would consider poseing for a painting, but when she turned around, I realized we had met before. Our lives had crossed through my past life as real estate broker. And so told her why I had been heading over to her and a few weeks later I got a call asking if I was serious about photographing and painting her. 100%.

When she got to Carson House, I had prepared the space but not the pose. I am not really a photographer and so I didn’t know what I wanted to see but I knew I would recognize it when I saw it. I asked her simply to move as she felt comfortable. To lift her hair. To let it fall. To repeat the gestures she performs every day without thinking. To be in the flow of embodiment. I took loads of images and then there was the one. I knew it immediately and that was that.

That image became the painting.

The raw photo in my studio.

The finished painting.

The Delight Project continues to unfold. Each painting is both singular and part of a larger conversation. Each woman brings her own history, her own relationship to visibility, her own understanding of delight. The hunger for a different question. The recognition that delight is not indulgent. It is a reclamation.

This work asks us to consider what happens when women are no longer framed as objects to be evaluated, but as women with agency who tell their own story, in their own voice. It asks what it means to inhabit a body not as a site of judgment, external or otherwise, but as a place of deep delight.

This is the work. And so I am inviting Oklahoma women to turn the lens inward and listen carefully. My work is radical becasue woman's joy is radical. My hope is that women will see a glimpse of themselves in this moment through witnessing each other's reclamation.