Western society has long created icons of popular culture, though today we worship idols of beauty and fame in a frenzied state of glorification. What inspires my work is why we choose to have icons at all. As a culture, I feel we are insecure and feed upon the glorification of others. This kind of worship is rooted in an age when people found solace in the spiritual authority of saints. Ordinary people could never be as pious as the deities so they worshipped the figures as a way of escaping the idea that they were not good enough.

I believe the nature of this insecurity is imbedded into our consciousness, and finds itself renewed in our attitudes towards beauty. We have, as represented in fashion magazines, found images to idolize that are as unobtainable as the saints we once worshipped. The women we deem models, the figures we accept as the epitome of human beauty and perfection, are most often so strange looking that sometimes we barely resemble the same species. They are either androgynous, wide-eyed, fish-lipped, or the walking dead. A magazine ad using one of these figures to sell something directly announces that this IS what we want to look at, what we worship, and it will make us buy whatever it is. We have created the market that seems so impossibly unreal.

Making use of these ideas in my work, I try to draw images that are both seductive and deceptively iconic. I want the image to bring light to what it would mean to be a glorified icon, a shell of a real human being. I also intend to consider what we deem beautiful. Investigating the demands of a greater society upon an idol, I want my figures to convey the strange double-edged sword of being wanted, even by the enamored and dedicated hand that drew them.