FINE ART DRAWING
Io sono italiana
I create images that explore survival, transformation, and the quiet power of endurance. Returning to personal history, my work examines broader cultural narratives around women, particularly the tensions between vulnerability and strength, visibility and restraint. I seek to reclaim voice and presence for bodies and experiences that have often been diminished or asked to remain small.
This body of work, Io Sono Italiana, marks a shift in my practice, into oil painting and a world of color and joy, la mia dolce vita. In these self-portraits, I am no longer examining my identity, but actively claiming it.
In June of 2025, I took my tween to Italy. For me it was a sort of homecoming: when I was 16, I lived near Rome as a foreign exchange student for a year. I hadn’t returned to the eternal city since my youth. Returning more than two decades later, I felt an unexpected sense of belonging and serenity.
The drawings that I create is very frequently in the vein—and chiaroscuro—of Caravaggio, who was also the initial muse for this Italian adventure. But my return reframed my vision. Before seeing the Caravaggio retrospective in Rome, I encountered an exhibition of Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda. Every aspect of the exhibition celebrated Italian life and culture through genuine love and reverence. It included a series of oil paintings by Anh Duong—self-portraits that reinterpreted classical Italian masterworks, infused with una vita bellissima and adorned in Dolce & Gabbana. Her work stayed with me. I carried it through Rome for a week, and everything I encountered—Caravaggio included, but more importantly my own experience—was suddenly filtered through jewel-toned light and oversized sunglasses.
What emerged was not darkness, but color, vitality, and celebration—of life, of my life. I came to understand that my idiosyncrasies, my path, and my past make me uniquely Italian. I am Italian. Io Sono Italiana.
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Each self-portrait features a crown, not as a symbol of authority or superiority, but as an emblem of what makes me intrinsically Italian. Rooted in personal mythology, these paintings draw from lived experience, imagination, and the lush palette of a country I love and long to belong to—where beauty is essential, storytelling is embodied, and life is allowed to be abundant.
Sono un pomodoro
I am a tomato.
2026, 18x24 inches. Oil on Panel
And what makes me a tomato, one might ask?
The last few years have been fraught with fear, but Italy showed me a way to embrace my complicated path forward. After being diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer, I now live life with hot flashes. When they come, I turn bright red — flushed, overheated, unmistakable. I look like a tomato.
I walked all over Rome as a tomato. Then Sicily.
Io Sono Un Pomodoro is set in Agrigento, Sicily. On my Vespa, I feel the cool breeze even on the hottest hot-flash days. Before me stretch ancient olive orchards and even more ancient Greek temple ruins — reminders of endurance, continuity, and the long view of time. There is so much still ahead of me, and so much to savor along the way.
Including, of course, excellent caprese salads.
Io sono una gabianella
I am a seagull.
2026, 18x24 inches. Oil on Panel
The first book I ever read in Italian was La Gabbianella e il Gatto. I read it in 1998, and it has stayed with me—waiting.
I am a seagull. Watching them, you see how they are both exuberant in their insecure in a joyfully watchful for their own wellbeing. I feel like I comically connect with their deeply concerned nature of “what is mine.” I am also playful and curious, drawn to and laughter. Gulls survive by adapting. They hover, they circle, they return. My recent years have been about adapting, and surviving.
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This painting is set in Venice. After returning to Italy after more than two decades, Rome felt like home—but in Venice I felt found. It is a city where it is impossible not to get lost, and yet my intuition, my bird’s-eye view, knew exactly where I was.
I hold an egg as a symbol of new life—the life I am beginning after cancer. My small albino dog sits with me in the boat, a reminder that I am not alone. Afloat together, I am ready to move forward. I am learning to trust my wings.
Io sono on topo. Sono un Leone
I am a mouse. I am a Lion.
2026, 18x24 inches. Oil on Panel
In Rome, I felt at home—a queen of my own self. Lions are everywhere there: carved in stone, guarding fountains, holding the weight of history in their paws. We sit together, sipping our espresso, the lion and I, unbothered by time.
As a child, my nickname was “mouse.” For years—decades—I worked to make myself smaller, quieter, easier to overlook. Like a mouse, I learned how to survive by shrinking. But in my drawings, I am large. I take up space. I am a lion.
In Italy, I don’t have to choose. I can be both. A polite lion, yes — but still a lion.
At my feet, two mice look on. One is small and watching. The other wears armor. With a sewing needle for a sword, the knight mouse scratches a word into the ground: Leone. He is showing the younger mouse what it might become.
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This is how I understand myself now—not as a contradiction, but as a becoming.
Sono una nottambula
I am a night owl.
2026, 18x24 inches. Oil on Panel
I am a night walker.
There isn’t a graceful English translation for nottambula. It comes closest to what Americans call a “night owl,” but that phrase misses the point. In Italy, the night isn’t something to survive or squeeze in after productivity—it’s where life happens.
Breakfast is optional. Lunch comes late. Dinner comes even later. Time stretches. Conversations linger. Pleasure is not postponed. This is dolce far niente—the art of doing nothing, and doing it well.
American culture praises the early bird, the first to rise, the one who catches the worm. Italy prefers those who stay a little longer, who sit, who sip, who notice. Italians are nottambuli.
We sit together at night in an ancient place marked SPQR — the Senate and People of Rome — a reminder that culture endures not through urgency, but through shared life. Behind us stands Romulus and Remus, raised by the wolf — strength born of instinct and community. Beside me lounges my cat, Fiona, in her nocturnal glory. The wolf, the cat, and I all understand the night.
This painting is about choosing presence over haste. About living in rhythm with pleasure, history, and one another.
I am not rushing toward morning. I am exactly where I belong.
