Lavender McCaffrey
"Lavender McCaffrey is an artist from Roselle Park, New Jersey, who, aside from painting, is a writer, photographer, and musician under the name The Convincing Actor. She has been painting for about a year, and is most influenced by surrealism, american folk art, outsider art, and art made by children. Her intention, in part, is to explore sensations and memories commonly thought to be relegated to childhood, but which emerge later in life as ongoing threads between multiple sensory and emotional experiences, such as the potent, yet lulling sadness one may inexplicably feel while glancing at a flower; sensations which are familiar but hard to concretize or explain. She intends to develop those sensations through juxtapositions and depictions which adopt a soft and subtle surrealist influence, while eschewing, if not disavowing, the aesthetics and motifs of both fantasy and sci-fi which contemporary, self-proclaimed "outsiders" use as a method to escape from creativity rather than embrace it. The result, she hopes, is equal parts eery and contented, alarming yet without malice or sadism... a fixation on pain without the premise of harm. Regardless of whether the viewer is conscious of this interpretation, she wants you to have fun with her work, and feel understood."