A painter drawn to the human face — what it holds, what it hides, and what lives just beneath the surface. My work is oil and pencil, dark backgrounds, figures that feel like they've existed long before I put them on canvas.

I've spent years building a practice rooted in the figurative tradition, but pulled toward mythology, the celestial, and the strangely tender. Every painting begins with a question I can't answer any other way. The studio is where I go to find out.

Welcome, I'm VERA

Whether I'm working from life, from memory, or from a photograph a collector has carried in their pocket for years, I approach every painting the same way — slowly, and without shortcuts. The face has to be earned. The background has to be felt. Nothing is placed until it's right.

A finished painting should outlast the moment it came from. It should look different at forty than it did the day it arrived — richer, stranger, more layered. That's what I'm working toward every time I pick up a brush.yours.