In Megan Elizabeth Read’s highly refined paintings, figurative and still life subjects are often placed in dark, vast environments giving the viewer a glimpse into calm, contemplative worlds. Her quiet shadowy works tend to revolve around traditional elements like flowers or the nude figure but often include contemporary references to brands and splashes of color that invoke a sense of surprise. Working in oil, sometimes at quite a large scale, her paintings explore the concepts of human expansion, contraction, vulnerability, protection and other contradictory themes such as the perpetual or constant vs the transitory and contemporary. She considers many of her paintings aspirational portraits of multiple selves: who you are, who you want to be, and all of the you’s that must coexist.
At the most basic level, the tensions, contradictions, and complexities of simply existing here, now… often seem too big, too dissonant, and too dreamlike for me to grasp. My attempts to paint them are my way tofind an order in things and often lead to these layered portraits of multiple selves. Subjective snapshots, reflecting the inside out.