Duessa Art

I am a Brooklyn-based painter and illustrator who specializes in the erotic and esoteric. I have a lifelong love of storytelling and art, but studying oil painting, illustration, and art history during my BFA and MFA galvanized my creation into a directed professional practice.

Figure painting and boudoir portraiture are my passions; from my sex-positive tarot deck to personal commissions of boudoir portraits, my artistic practice is expansive in its definition of “boudoir.” I am all about the sex-positive, body-positive, and inclusive. Beauty comes in so many different forms and faces, and my art is all about exploring the manifold shapes it can take. I love to reference both the contemporary art world and the art historical cannon through my art, as well as the film and media that are important to me. Eroticism plays a prominent role in everything I create, through the seductive charge of a gorgeous boudoir composition, the narratives shown in each Tarot card in the Duessa deck, or the personally-charged objects I choose for a still-life. Eroticism goes beyond the bedroom, and plays a role in recognizing the joy and beauty in all facets of art as well as life. Audre Lorde encapsulates my artistic motivation in her “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power:”

“Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives… In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”

-Audre Lorde