These paintings were from my senior thesis project at Pacific NW College of Art. I was exploring beauty in relationship to the contemporary female nude by making nude self-portrait paintings. My main focus was on the aesthetics of the oil paintings and to render the figure as best I could, to make a figure painting that I found successful. In using the tradition of the female nude, I adapted poses from several historical paintings and composed a few myself. I wanted to be able to incorporate my tattoos into the paintings so they do not stand out. I was also using these paintings to comment on the current obsession in our culture with tattooing our bodies and how this does not affect the beauty of the nude figure.