Artist Statement

I often think about life “before”—about encountering my younger self while knowing the shape of the life ahead of her.

I think of that younger self with tenderness and a certain element of whimsy. I have wondered about Mary in much the same way: what, if anything, did that young girl know? What appeared in her dreams?

She would become a woman who carried the grief of the infant, child, and man who would carry the grief of the world. But first, she was simply young.

I painted her here with the shadow of her eventuality behind her: a scene from Giotto’s Pietà. She seems to feel the weight of a sorrow whose extent and cause she cannot yet know—a future at once distant from her and already present.

(The Pietà is a specific form of the Lamentation of Christ in which Jesus is mourned by the Virgin Mary)