Kelsey 2022

Monica Ikegwu's painting, *Kelsey,* captures the sitter in a pink ruffled dress against a pink backdrop. The artist has a wonderful sense of color, that pink is so luscious you could almost eat it! I imagine Ikegwu layering the paint, letting it settle into a perfectly realized, but imaginary space. It’s such a confident handling of the medium. And those ruffles, those cascades of pink; they're not just decoration, they're part of a visual language, a way of speaking about the world. The direct gaze of the sitter immediately grabs your attention. What’s so compelling is the way the painting invites you into a world of emotion and feeling. The longer you look, the more you sense an ongoing dialogue between the artist and her predecessors – all those who have wrestled with the same problems of representation, color, and form. The conversation continues.