2011 Orlando Project

These paintings were inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel "Orlando." The title character begins the book as a young boy living in Elizabethan England, then mysteriously lives for many centuries, changing gender along the way to end the book as a woman of thirty-six in the 1920s.  Most of these paintings are inspired by the following quotation: ​"What can the biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament in which Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore—since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now—there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind." -Virginia Woolf, "Orlando" ​Click each image for more details about the work. At the end, you can also view newer paintings on the theme of Orlando.