New York City transplant Mira Gandy showed off a collection of her emotional paintings last week at BASH. Her vision for the show almost overshadowed the art itself. She used the area’s best-known drag queens, including Onyx, to display her work. They walked, they held up her work, and they pouted and strutted. It was an even blend of art, fashion and flamboyance.

Through it all, Gandy’s art was the focal point of the evening. Her work is a Day-Glo mixture of someone’s innermost thoughts put to canvas. "My art is based on emotion. The look on someone’s face, the look in their eyes, that sort of thing. It sounds pretty corny, but I do believe that the eyes are the windows to the soul. I feel that my energy is really colorful," Gandy says.

What’s not so corny is what she has accomplished so thus far. She graduated from New York City Music and Art High School. She has studied in Paris. Her work is in the private collections of celebrities such as Queen Latifah, talk show host Rolanda Watts and gossip columnist Flo Anthony. These achievements provide inspiration for her future goal.

Gandy plans on taking her show to other cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta, but South Beach seems to be where she plans on staying. "I just felt really stagnant. I felt like I needed a change. I didn’t want to go to L.A. I wanted to go somewhere where I could just chill out. I ended up coming down to South Beach. I saw that it was just like the Village with a beach. I could get around without getting bored. I wanted somewhere where I could paint more. So here I am. I have been here for three years.

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