The idea for this series came to me the day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. As a lifelong Democrat, I was desperate to understand how a majority (however slim) of Americans could have voted for him. 

I googled the phrase Why I voted for Trump and over the course of several days found 50 people who had publicly proclaimed their support, either in interviews with media outlets or in op-eds they had written for national and regional newspapers. I decided that I would paint portraits of each of these voters. 

This was a revelatory process for me. For each portrait, I had to “get to know” the subject intimately—while at the same time learning how to paint, which I hadn't done before—and in that process, I discovered I was connecting with each person in a way that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to pull off otherwise in these hyper-polarized times. I personally think these people have made a grievous mistake enabling Trump to lead our country, but this series is really beyond my politics. It’s about bridging a divide that seems impossible to narrow in any other way, at least for now. 

Before I began work on this series, I deleted all my social media accounts. With My Fellow Americans, I went analog, engaging with the physical act of painting to reckon with—and perhaps even offer a modest alternative to—a fractured world.