Roadside Marilyn

Roadside Marilyn is a painting within a series of work titled Roman Spring; a series of paintings and drawings that is based on the artist’s fleeting roadside encounters along the Via Aurelia in the Roman countryside, where moments of striking natural beauty are punctuated by the presence of women waiting along the road. Set against the shifting seasons of the Italian landscape, these figures appear almost as elements of the environment itself—momentarily emerging before dissolving again into fields, wooded edges, and shadowed backgrounds. Moving between the immediate foreground of the roadside and the darker, more ambiguous spaces beyond it, the work evokes a tension between beauty and unease, presence and disappearance. Through these quiet yet charged scenes, the work reflects on visibility, survival, and the social realities that remain hidden in plain sight.