The Mistake
Oil on canvas, 72 × 48 in.
In The Mistake, a bride stands arrested on the brink of irreversible commitment, her back to the viewer, her future just beyond the doorframe. Rendered in sweeping, viscous strokes of ivory, cerulean, and bruised ocher, the figure is both monument and mirage: the white silk slip (half bridal undergarment, half shroud) clings to her hips like a confession she hasn’t yet voiced. One strap has surrendered, sliding down a shoulder blade that catches the light like a blade catching breath. Her bouquet, a clenched knot of green, is already surrendering its petals to gravity.
The palette is the color of old photographs left too long in sunlight: memory bleached at the edges. Light pours in from an unseen window, but it is not celebratory; it is interrogative, stripping the room of comfort and the bride of certainty. The brushwork itself trembles (thick impasto in the dress, scumbled haze in the background), as if the canvas were vibrating with the pulse in her throat. Every stroke refuses finish, mirroring the moment when “I do” curdles into “WHY DID I?”
Ultimately, the painting is a masterclass in negative space: the unseen face, the unspoken vow, the life that will not be lived. It leaves us standing behind her, holding our breath, unsure whether we are urging her forward or begging her to turn back.
The Best Dancer I Ever Saw SYLVIE GUILLEM
I KISS ON THE FIRST DATE… BUT I DON’T WANT TO
She emerges from the void like a match struck in a blackout. Colette’s face is half-lit by a sickly cadmium glow, the rest swallowed by a midnight ground so dense it feels wet. Stein drags raw sienna and quinacridone rose across her skin in frantic, overlapping strokes, as if trying to scrub the sadness off and only making it bleed deeper.
Her eyes (those pale, glassy greens) stare straight through you with the hollowed-out hope of someone who has already been told “no” by every mirror.
The mouth is the wound: lips parted in a half-smile that never reaches the eyes, teeth just visible, like a plea she’s tired of voicing.
Hair streams down in molten gold and Naples yellow, each strand painted with the violence of someone ripping pages from a diary.
The brushwork is pure desperation (slashes, smears, fingerprints), evidence of every night she promised herself “tomorrow will be different” and woke up hungover on the same floor.
This is the second canvas Colette has given Stein since she was nineteen. The first one, he says, was a rehearsal. This one is the confession. She is twenty-one and terrified that love is a limited resource she has already spent.
The self-destruction is not a phase; it is the only language she trusts to make people stay long enough to notice she’s drowning.
Stand close and the paint reeks of turpentine and sleeplessness. Step back and the darkness eats her edges, as if the canvas itself is trying to finish the job.
Stein leaves the question dripping in the lower left, scrawled in raw umber: Do you believe she can change?
The longer you look, the more the portrait answers for you: Only if someone finally looks back without flinching.
Do You Know Me?
Do You Know Me? is a confrontation disguised as a portrait. Susan Rich, summa cum laude UCLA film grad, meets us chest-first in a blood-red scalloped bra that reads less like lingerie than like scar tissue. Her breasts are painted heavy, unapologetic, the very currency men traded for her personhood. Below them, the belly folds softly; above, the face fractures. One eye drifts, the other pins you with washed-out green. A faint mustache glints. Nothing is airbrushed, nothing forgiven.
The background is a storm of phthalo and neglect; she floats forward, untethered from context, because context never saved her. Her father loved her siblings, not her. Mental illness was the silent inheritance he denied passing down. Thick paint is dragged like evidence: here is the body that granted a girl power and later punished her for it; here is the mind no one asked to meet.
This is not empowerment. This is indictment. Walk past quickly and see a pin-up gone wrong. Stand still and the canvas asks the only question that matters: Do You Know Me?, or just the parts you were taught to want?
I wanted to do a piece of art on a transgender person because that speaks directly to genetics. During our sessions, we talked about her way of life and her unique perspective on gender identity.
MIKE sees herself as a beautiful woman with a penis. She realized at an early age that men found her fascinating and would pay to be with her. She now is in very high demand as an escort and has a marvelous lifestyle. She says what makes her truly unique are her female qualities combined with extraordinary male characteristics – such as wanting and loving sex. She boasts that she can always get an erection and always achieve an orgasm. She says, “I’m so thankful that God made me this way.”
Let me ask you,
Do you know what a transgender person is? Do you know the difference between transgender and hermaphrodite?
What would you do if you were on a date with a beautiful woman and you discovered she had a penis?
Girl With Pencil
The first thing you notice is the wound that isn’t there. A single, viscous rivulet of alizarin crimson drips from the left edge, thick as fresh blood, then peters out halfway down the canvas like a scream that lost its voice. Beside it stands Rhonda—naked, monumental, gray as ash. Stein has rubbed graphite into the paint until her skin feels powdered with memory. No nipples, no navel, only the faintest dark triangle at the pubis: the body reduced to evidence.
Her face is the second violence. Eyes too wide, mouth a sealed hyphen, hair scraped back so severely the skull beneath looks bruised. She stares straight ahead with the flat affect of someone who has already told the worst story and is waiting to see if you flinch. Stein withholds color from her the way the world withheld protection.
The background is a cold cerulean wash—hospital corridor, interrogation room, childhood bedroom—indistinguishable.
The title is the third cruelty. *Girl With Pencil*. Not woman, not dancer, not survivor. Girl. And there it is, barely: a whisper-thin graphite shard clenched in her lowered right hand, so faint it almost dissolves into the drip that grazes it. Stein gives the weapon just enough presence to hurt—small, domestic, erasable—then lets the red river eclipse it. You supply the rest; the canvas refuses to dignify the object twice.
The violation happened off-canvas, two years before Rhonda finally spoke the sentence that ended the search for the perfect dancer-model. Her mother knew. Her mother did nothing. The drip is accusation, menstruation, lifeblood, all of it wasted.
Rhonda still wants her father’s love. Stein paints that want as negative space: arms hanging useless, the pencil hand half-curled like a child still offering the broken toy to Daddy. The body that earned a master’s in dance is rendered immobile, fossilized in trauma. This is not catharsis. This is indictment without resolution, a canvas that refuses to heal so the viewer cannot look away.
Stand close and the graphite catches light like scar tissue. Step back and the red drip becomes a leash tying her to the past. Either way, the question is the same: How many girls do you know who still answer to the name their rapist gave them?
I HATE HIM
It’s a face that fills the entire canvas and still feels too small to contain the scream. Melissa’s eyes (those swamp-green, bloodshot eyes) lock onto yours with the unblinking force of a child who once hid under the kitchen table while fists landed on her mother’s body. Stein has scraped and scumbled the paint until the skin looks flayed: copper oxide, burnt sienna, and raw flesh tones rubbed into a bruise that never heals. Every brushstroke is a suppressed flinch.
The mouth is barely there, a thin violet line pressed so hard it almost disappears, as if speech itself were treason. No background, no mercy; just the head floating in a furnace of oxidized reds, the color of old blood baked into wallpaper. The surface is scarred with cross-hatched fury; stand close and you can feel the heat rising off the Gessobord.
She hates men. She despises them. She told Stein this between sittings, voice flat, matter-of-fact, the way other people mention the weather. Yet the eyes plead for the one man she cannot hate out of existence: Daddy. That contradiction is the knife Stein twists, slowly, lovingly. The gaze is equal parts accusation and supplication (Kill him for me / Please love me anyway).
This is not a portrait of trauma survived; it is trauma still living in the marrow. The longer you look, the more the painting looks back and asks the question no child should ever have to carry: Why wasn’t hating him enough to make him stop?
Tanya is from Tahiti – what I call the Devil’s Island. She told me that there is a lot of mental illness on the island that is most likely a result of the rampant incest that goes on there. Several months into our talks, Tanya told me that she saw her mother jump off a cliff committing suicide. Six months after her mother died, her father molested her in the shower.
Tess is a bartender. Although very sweet and pretty, her relationships never lasted. She said she didn’t choose well. She seemed to be depressed often. As we talked, she told me her greatest fear was being alone. It haunted her. We both drank a lot. Vodka on the rocks with a lemon twist. The portrait depicts her sitting on a bed, crying, with a drink, telling me about the morning she woke up and found her underwear around her ankles. She was 8 and this was the first time she told the story. It was her father.
Toni was born in Sicily and for the first 27 years of her life she describes how her father beat her EVERYDAY! She never mentioned her mother. One day she had enough of the abuse and ran away. She was 27 and thought everyone was beaten by their fathers until she arrived in America.
She has a son but is not married. She struggles with the intense anger of realizing how much of her life was lost. She can’t seem to make any connection with men. She says, “I am very scared of men, they ruled my life for so long, I have no trust.”
My portrait of Toni shows her falling thru the cracks not able to grasp on to something that will stop her fall until just before hitting rock bottom she says to herself….. “OH MAN UP!” As a result, she is able to get on with her life. Not happily, but proceeding day by day.
Can you imagine inheriting her father’s genes?
I found Lea online. She’s an escort. She loved my art project and wanted to participate. Lea became an escort because she would go out to dinner with a guy and was expected to have sex afterwards. It wasn’t working. “Why have sex with a guy just because he took me to dinner? I’m worth so much more than a meal and conversation. I’m going to charge them.” She says, “I love the power, I love the money, and I love the sex.” She feels unshackled and in control.
Clare is a physical therapist. We talked a lot about her genetic background and found that her behavior was a duplicate of her mother’s. Today they both talk about their issues freely with each other. She told me how she wishes she could explore her sexuality but without hurting the one she loves.
I wanted to do a project about sisters. Kathy and Melina wanted to participate because they thought it would help bring them closer. They loved each other but didn’t like each other. I could see in the process of choosing the pose how the older sister just seemed to take a uniquely protective position while the other sister just naturally assumed the role of the submissive one needing protection.
Several years earlier, Kathy killed someone while driving. I don’t think one can ever escape the memory of such a tragedy especially being the daughter of a very dominant and powerful mother and a submissive father.
Is your mother extremely dominant? Are you?
Do you have a weak father?
Featured in Apero August 2017 Catalogue
Evita cleaned the piss off my toilets for 35 years. It took her two hours each way by bus to get to my place. She had two boys with the common-law man she lived with. The boys were fully grown when he asked her to marry him. She was thrilled and said yes to him. The ceremony was beautiful. Full of people she loved and loved her. One week after the wedding she caught him fucking another woman.
I met Lettie at one of my shows. My assistant told me of a girl in a green dress who wanted to meet me. In walks this breathtaking woman and the first thing I noticed was the dress was stained. She immediately became my model. We drank booze during each session. It soon became apparent that drinking was an issue and so were the men in her life.
Moorea is always 82°, sun shining, light breezes, crystal water, PARADISE. The place is so fertile that you could stick your dick in the soil and it would grow. I spent a month on this island and worked with four models.
Model #1 is very sweet. She thinks her real father is her uncle. Doesn’t care.
Model #2 is beautiful and wild. She and her friends go out, drink beer, smoke, steal, and have sex every night. If she has a second baby, it is the custom to give it to your grandmother to raise.
Model #3 is pregnant with her second child. The first sperm donor beat her. To get even, she got pregnant from No.1’s best friend.
Model #4 is consumed by the island’s customs. She constantly participated in rituals that were hard for her to talk about. She had no life.
Each of these women told me about the incest on the island – it is the biggest issue not talked about to outsiders.
Suzanne and Kristy are sisters and are not close. They agreed to do the project together although I never knew why. Suzanne was the dominant and most accomplished of the two with a remarkable work history. Kristy was nothing like that. Kristy had a daughter living homeless in Vermont. Suzanne was married four times, no children and was currently single. I always wondered why they didn’t look anything alike.
One Christmas Eve, when they were younger their father committed suicide. Many years later Suzanne slit her wrists. Because it was so cold her bleeding slowed and her husband at the time was able to save her.
I met Sam when she was modeling for Laddie John Dill. She was a great model and I got to know her a little. I told her to come to the studio dressed in a way that she wants the world to see her. She arrived wearing a pale blue bustier and posed with one nipple sticking out, sitting on a stool, with her legs spread open, exposing her vagina. I felt that was not how she truly wanted to be seen. Sam’s eyes in this painting are where her story truly resides.
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