There’s a game I sometimes play at the museum: ‘what kind of painting am I today?’ Never, despite my best attempts, am I an angelic Botticelli. When hungover and weary, perhaps a Toulouse-Lautrec. When swaddled in loneliness, absolutely an Edward Hopper.

As a child, art was my favorite pastime, a way to distract myself from what was going on around me, and a way to make others happy. As an adult, art serves an entirely different purpose in my life. I aim to make people feel both uncomfortable and understood. Art is no longer a tool for distraction, but a tool for exposure, leading me to confront my... See more

Pearson uses her body almost like clay, molding herself to the forms that fill her mind and fanatically capturing the different angles and perspectives. Her paintings hold a large visual interest through shape alone, but adding these narrative moments and meaning makes the work that much more enticing.

For Pegues, David’s painting set in motion a lifetime of looking. “You realize, you’ve got something that can feed you for the rest of your life as a career: questions and the search for answers, the appreciation of beauty, and then wanting to share it with other people, just like we are doing right now to go look at it closely together.”