My new painting series, Women in Possession of Good Fortune, develops the ethnographic tendency of my practice that I previously explored in still-life compositions, and am now extending to portraiture. The title of the series refers to the opening lines of Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice and alludes to both the persistence of sexist assumptions and the achievements made by women from different races, ages, and sexual orientations. The subjects are women and non-binary people in creative fields posed to echo historical figurative paintings. In this particular piece, Kit, artist, curator, and designer poses to mimic Caravaggio's painting, David with the Head of Goliath (1610). Interviews and research into their working lives generate ways for me to render pictorially—through allusions, icons, objects, patterns, and symbols—the rich personhood of my subjects. In this painting, Kit is holding Hermés handbag based on Korean pojagi design and a selfie-stick instead of Goliath's head and a sword. I depict the human figure in a meticulous realist style at the center of the compositions, surrounding them with design elements from widely dispersed cultures as a testament to the deep history of transnational cultural exchanges. Imbuing the feminist example of the Pattern and Decoration Movement with recurring, multicultural motifs, I create heterogeneous, colorful, and exactingly detailed paintings using varied techniques—exposed under-drawings, hyperrealism, hard-edged abstract elements, thick impasto—and media including oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor, and colored pencil.