"The nails are mine" said Barbara, a voluptuous, wealthy piece-of-work originally from New York, now living in New Orleans. I exploited her image with my camera while she gobbled up the attention along with an entire bowl of grapes.

"I like everything to be big, the bigger the better," she explained. Later when I showed her my 3-minute film entitled 'Lives of the Deprived', she got the wrong idea and blurted out, "I hate poor people!"

Perhaps I didn't inform her of my intention to make work about the women I so love to hate called Ice Queens. Barbara is the epitome of an Ice Queen: millions of inherited dollars in the bank, psychoanalysis for the past 15 years, and a loose mouth from incessant daily gossiping.

My subjects are collected from a vast profile. Each one selected on the basis of having the right spirit for the project. Initially I began with images pulled from magazines selling products to the rich and rich at heart. This got the ball rolling.

The streets of SOHO and Fifth Avenue gave me a sense of who really is out there. I note what people are buying and how they represent themselves when exploring the sacred world of Manhattan upscale shopping. To research the dames before my time, I venture to the Mid-Manhattan Library's picture collection, where I apprpriate images of notorious women. Leona Helmsley, Joan Crawford, and Imelda Marcos specifically inspire me due to their bizarre reputations. After having made work based on strangers, I began to look closer to home for inspiration. I find that painting my friends and relatives is far more difficult, but more emotionally rewarding.

I use a variety of materials to create my work. Excess is best. I paint in oil, but adding glitter, buttons and bows makes me tick. In the material world, big flashy things excite me and the added detail on my canvas is the cherry on the cake.

The drive to make these paintings and projects comes from a desire to possess the finer things. When observing my specimens, I am both in rage and in awe of their appearance and wealth. I want to be my own version of an Ice Queen - the kind that has access to everything, but chooses to ride the subway.