The process of making art for me is part meditation, part storytelling, and always an attempt to communicate from the heart. The edges of an image define a small, specific piece of the infinite world, at a particular time, from my particular point of view. The space in a painting is a metaphor for existence; the image is a record of my experience. The qualities of the materials-viscosity and color of paint, mark-making and charcoal textures in drawing, color, texture, layering, and surprises in printmaking are all just as important as the images and ideas. Each painting, drawing, print, collage, or book is a dialogue: an interaction between the materials, internal experience, external experience, observation, ideas, and memory.
Paintings in the Landscape series are responses to the experience of walking through places that resonate with me for various reasons.
The Garden paintings are observations of flowers, mostly from the extremely unmanicured gardens around my house.
Although making art is always some kind of escape from the external world, the Refuge series is about intentionally using painting as a means of escape, and making paintings that are mental refuges for me.
Tales of the Farblunget combine my responses to certain kinds of landscapes with the story about how I am experiencing living with my husband’s dementia. Farblunget means lost and confused in Yiddish. My husband has Alzheimer's disease. The "conversations" that my lost and confused husband and I have these days are not only excruciatingly repetitive, but they are also often absurd, strange, surreal, and sometimes, especially in retrospect, hilarious: Farblunget. The titles of these paintings are direct quotes from him. This is my way of processing, communicating, and making a record of my experience. No one could imagine what it’s like, unless you could witness it.
I have been making art for as long as I can remember. I graduated from Cornell University in 1982 with a BFA in painting, and from Boston University in 1985 with an MFA in Studio Teaching. I taught art in one way or another, including 30 years in public elementary schools, until I retired from teaching in June 2023. I continue to work in my studio in Foxborough, MA.