"chickenshit little bitch", Acrylic on 12"x14" canvas, Katrina Evans, 2026
Β I don't like to explain my pieces often. I feel like the images speak for themselves, and they say different things to different people. Sometimes I create very personal art and more than I don't want to talk about where it came from, I'm not sure people want to hear it.
I don't know if they want to know the reason that I painted this is for the little girl I used to be, who was awkward and verbally abused. This is a shot of me having a tantrum after my mother teased me about my βbadβ singing. I had been playing dress up and doing a bad impersonation of an opera singer into a pink kid microphone. As I got upset with her she decided to keep shooting, thinking the whole thing funny.
I don't even think this was that bad, and not the worst thing my mom ever did to me, but my expression encompasses, to me, how frustrated and lonely I was. I remember feeling like no one understood me, and so I raged at the idea that when I was vulnerable and being open my mother who I was supposed to trust would laugh at me. And instead of trying to calm me down, make me even more upset by taking photos.
In the end, I guess I'm glad she took the photo so I could paint it as adult. There was something very cathartic about laying the paint and finding the form inside those layers.
I started with a bright pink underpainting, to give myself a look of blushing all over or brimming with pink rage. I added an outline which I unfortunately didn't get a picture of, and then moved onto blending in brighter oranges and darker violets as shadows.
These are just the types of colors I use lately, if I'm honest, but this palette was intentional to portray a bright, happy facade with traditional gendered colors covering all the frustration and desperation inside the subject.
The hardest part for me was the overall likeness. I do think the finished piece looks older than the five year old I was in the photo, and even though I see the desperation in my eyes I think there's a lack of the rage in my mouth. But maybe I'll paint it again one day and do better, maybe I'll never paint it again. I think I got what I needed out of the experience, and of sharing it.
The title is something my mother would often call me, growing up even when I was young, when she was very upset with me. But mostly she used it to make me feel like a pathetic, hopeless being. I'm using it a tad ironically here, tongue in cheek, because sometimes I worry I am in fact what my mother called me but mostly think it was always her being the cowardly one.
