In Conversation With Caillebotte

A Note from the Artist

This year marks my seventh year partnering with the Art Institute of Chicago through Project Windows, a citywide celebration of the arts that connects past to present through creative collaborations between contemporary artists and commerce.

My latest works are now on display at Water Tower Place, Fourth Floor. This series was created to launch in conjunction with the exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World, now on view through October 5, 2025, at the Art Institute of Chicago.

While many know Caillebotte's street scenes and studies of modern life, some of his more intimate works touch on something I'm quite familiar with. These are the portraits of friends caught in quiet moments, often surrounded by the soft rhythm of the everyday. I feel a real kinship with the way he painted the people he knew, in the places that mattered to him. And like me, he found beauty in the garden.

A few months ago, I was sitting with my dear friend Dawn under her tulip tree. Her garden is a space that feels like home. (If you follow me on instagram, you may have seen my shares about my friend that welcomes me with tea and chocolate under the tulip tree... that's Dawn). As she served me one of her infamous homemade desserts and tea, we spoke about friendship and about how special that patch of ground had become to us. At one point, she leaned back and said, “Sometimes you can just feel the breeze pass right through you.” There was something about her in that moment. The way she so gracefully leaned back, extended her arms and relinquished herself to nature. She looked peaceful, grounded, and radiant. I saw presence.. Beauty.

I asked her, on impulse, "Hey, do you have a set of striped pajamas?" A strange thing to ask, but at this point friends just know. She laughed and said, “Actually, I do.” I asked her to put them on. This is how I know I am loved. She didn’t complain. She was back in the garden in her striped jammies in no time. I took a few snapshots on my phone.

That moment became the foundation for her portrait. It felt like a contemporary echo of Caillebotte’s sensitivity to subject and setting. As I worked on her piece, I felt called to create a companion painting of myself. It's not a self-portrait in the traditional sense, but a visual reflection of the same emotional landscape. These works became a quiet conversation between women and their gardens. Between myself and the painter who, over a century ago, also wandered into his garden and painted what only nature could provide.

The third piece in the collection, and the one that quietly anchors the exhibit, began nearly two years ago. It is a large-scale work, six by eight feet, rendered slowly in colored pencil on cotton duck canvas. The vision for it came to me during another afternoon with Dawn, once again under the tulip tree, over tea.

From the beginning, I sensed something layered and deeply felt in this piece. Two women, both seated, both still, each one representing aspects of the same self. A meditation on friendship, sisterhood, and the reflective symmetry of women who know each other deeply.

I worked on the piece here and there for six months. Colored pencil is a slow medium, and large works ask for patience so I paused. Sometimes (often) a piece needs time and silence in order to speak. I long for that quiet dialogue, when the work begins to tell me what it needs next.

I returned to it over the winter- maybe a call to sit in the metaphorical garden during Chicago's crispy winter. Suddenly everything became clear. It needed a hint of blue-striped linen. It called for the ceremony of tea... saucers, teacups, teapots. Once those elements arrived, the piece came together quickly.

I had no idea at the time that stripes would become a throughline in this project. I see them everywhere now and there are more artworks under way that are all about women and the space they inhabit internally and externally, in their gardens, and you guessed it, IN STRIPES.

Caillebotte and I are painting from the same source: flowers, friendship, and the fleeting light of a moment that wants to be known and remembered.