I set out to find the hand underneath five paintings I had carried for years. What I found was my own.

These images reach us already flattened by reproduction, the hand that made them subtracted before we ever look. I went after that hand the only way I know how, scratching and laboring over the grounds of each composition, building up the marks that come before an image and then sanding them away. The making and its erasure are both the subject. Neither survives the other.

The suite is five paintings answering five sources: two pairs, and a fifth that ends the argument. In each, a hand is activated by the brushstroke rather than settled by it. The sitter's hand, my predecessors', my own.

Cecilia animates the subject of Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, a gestural charge now merging with the animal's pelt. Its counterpart, Lisa, takes the famously folded, passive hands of the Mona Lisa and puts a mirror in them. She stops being the object of the gaze and begins returning it.

The second pair reworks two paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi, both thought to use herself as the model. In Artemisia, after her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, I erase what she articulated. The right hand that grips the brush is blurred now, moving too fast to hold in our gaze. Catherine, after her Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, answers that erasure by bringing the hand back, beckoning us to look again.

Partway through, the project I thought I was making came apart. I use my own hands as models throughout, and I could not stop meeting them. After an injury to my dominant hand I relearned to paint with my left, a capacity I had not touched since childhood, and that relearned touch is legible in every mark in this suite. It taught me to see negative space where I had only ever seen the thing itself. It changed my relationship to these women and to the narrative in which I had understood them to fit. There was no buried truth under these images waiting to be lifted out. There was the network of making below the surface, which the abrasions make visible, and which is not a discovery but a construction.

The last work, Élisabeth, after Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun's Allegory of Poetry (1774, Musée Fabre), is where the suite completes itself. Every hand in these paintings does something its source did not. Here the hand sets down the brush and takes up the quill, turning away from the image and toward authorship. Somewhere in the making I stopped believing I was recovering a hand and understood that I was making one. I left the drawing raw. She was already present and needed no building up.

That is when I knew Foundations Unearthed was finished.