This page features works from Drea Cofield’s ongoing Selfie Project: ‘Send N*des’ series

ABOUT

For many years, I have engaged the genre of portraiture by painting selfies. Some are self-portraits, others depict friends or lovers, and many are sourced from strangers responding to an open call on the internet. The rules are simple: I invite my community and the public to submit photos they have taken of themselves. From these, I select images to paint in oil on small cardboard panels primed with shellac—a historical surface hewn roughly to the size of a phone or tablet.

At the heart of the Selfie Project is a meditation on the act of self-representation: the tension between the disposable immediacy of digital imaging and the slowness, vulnerability, and physicality of painting. I’m particularly drawn to the invitational nature of the nude selfie, which—like painting—is often created in solitude, shaped by the author’s gaze and the intentional crop of the frame. By translating these images into paint, I am investigating a new small theater of exhibitionism— one less about sex and more about the quiet, human desire to not only be seen, but rendered through touch. Beyond its conceptual framework, the Selfie Project is a serious inquiry into the language of painting, and more so, all my paintings are an exploration of the embodiment of looking—as speed, as touch, as material. One selfie may evoke the solitude of Edward Hopper, another the palette of Giotto, or the domestic quietude of Vermeer.

This work is deeply connected to my plein air landscape practice. Painting outside, from life, teaches me how to see—how color shifts in air and place, how space opens or collapses depending on light and form. That attention informs the selfie paintings, which I receive as flattened, digital images. Painting the landscape calibrates my eye to weight, observed color,and dimensionality, which I bring to these imaged bodies. More than a technical counterbalance, this connection between practices reflects a larger concern in my work: how we negotiate presence, how we locate ourselves in what we see and how we’re seen in an increasingly isolated and mediated world.

Drea Cofield (b. 1986) is an artist residing and working in Brooklyn, NY. Cofield is currently best known for her ongoing Selfie Project that merges the history of portraiture in painting with a broader contemporary conversation around self-imaging and what “looking” means in a digital world. She has exhibited widely including London, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York with recent solo exhibitions at Galleri Urbane, Soho Revue, Kravets Wehby Gallery, Future Fair in NYC. Upcoming shows include solo exhibitions at Kravets Wehby, New York, NY; May 2026. Her work has been featured in CULTURED, The Wall Street Journal, WhiteHot Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Contemporary Painting (World of Art). She is the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Yale Gloucester Painting Prize. Residencies include La Napoule Art Foundation Residency in 2025, Goldey House on Lake George, NY in 2024, and a Yaddo Residency in Saratoga Springs, NY, in 2023. Cofield received her B.A. from DePauw University (Greencastle, IN) in 2008 and her M.F.A from Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), in 2013.