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 Soho Revue, Kravets Wehby Gallery, Future Fair in NYC. 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 a 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.