Naya

About This Piece

This painting began with my daughter Naya, but I wanted to capture more than her likeness. I wanted to preserve something about this particular stage of childhood—the way a child can occupy a space so completely without thinking about how she appears in it. Her posture is relaxed and imperfect, her arm resting above her head, her bare feet crossing almost absentmindedly. There is nothing posed about the moment. That naturalness was what I wanted to keep. As I painted, the space around her became increasingly loose and abstract, almost as though the details of the room were becoming less important than the memory of the moment itself. Naya became, for me, a portrait not only of my daughter, but of a fleeting age—one that feels ordinary while you are living it and precious only when you realize how quickly it changes.