With longing and desires put on hold during the pandemic, craving for physicality and contact led to an exploration of the sensuality of oil paints.  This series merges and contrasts the historical masculine physical ideal with the delicate intricacy of floral structures. While so often in art the female form has been the focus of the viewer’s gaze, here a lustful eye is turned on the male body, luxuriating in muscle and tone, but subverting the masculine stare by replacing it with faceless vegetal structures — beautiful and alluring, yet open to the stamp of our own visual desires. A recent expansion of The Hothouse has been an exploration of fatness in female bodies, finding beauty in forms, like my own, that are not held up as the stereotypical ideal female body.