In the winter I began working on a new series of paintings. They’re all about “boyhood,” or at least that’s the closest word I’ve found to describe the concept I’m interested in.

Boyishness. “Boyish and disgusting”—that’s a (sort of) apocryphal description of my friend and me from the summer we decided to start going out a lot. We repeat it to each other grinningly pretty often when we’re up to no good.

In The Gist of Art, John Sloan says that “a record of emotions isn’t art in any medium, even music.” My paintings are born of emotional revelation, but they’re mostly about Chicago, about having swag and being free, about nighttime and drinking and hanging out in alleys and squeezing the lemon of youth.

I make paintings about chasing boyhood, about what it’s like to have a fascination with it as a 26-year-old girl. I’m inspired by cityscapes on the north side of Chicago, where I grew up. Like the Ashcan painters, I paint what I know, which is alleys, bars, nighttime, neighborhoods, and my buddies. I continue in the tradition of these painters, particularly Robert Henri and John Sloan, making portraits and genre paintings of city life with a dark palette, dirtiness, and truth. While they worked in early-20th-century in New York, I paint Chicago in 2026, glorifying and critiquing delinquency and drunken transgression.