JBTC

JBTC is a series of paintings portraying women drawn from history and visual culture. The project begins from a simple gesture of admiration: painting women because they are compelling, strange, powerful, beautiful, excessive, difficult, iconic.

Through portraiture, the series reclaims attention. It gathers female figures who have often been mythologised, idealised, judged, eroticised, or reduced to symbols, and reapproaches them through painterly interpretation. Rather than treating the portrait as a stable image of identity, the works explore how women are remembered, represented, and transformed across time.

The series also reflects on the act of looking. By repainting women from cultural memory, I question how historical images shape contemporary ideas of femininity, power, beauty, desire, and agency. These paintings are not straightforward tributes; they are attempts to spend time with these figures, to reframe them, and to allow them to occupy space on their own terms.