Artist Statement

The first universal organizing principle is transformation. When I was a plein air painter early on, the understanding that I was a transient being capturing a passing moment was inescapable. When I became old enough to see beloved comrades on their final days and long-awaited babies in their first hours, I saw lives ending and beginning, not just days.

Despite my commitment to acute observation, I needed invention to chart these goings and comings. I started making magical realist figure paintings. As a subject, I used myself, birds, and my dreams of flight and transformation. After I started adding other people, I realized I needed to explore my family.

I used these paintings to ask the fundamental questions: “Who am I? Where am I from and where am I going? How can I find belonging, freedom, and meaning?”  To answer, I used old family photos and images of crows— ordinary birds with extraordinary qualities. They are fitting companions for my family of wandering Jews, and for the daughter of parents who moved away from parents who moved away from parents. Like my family, crows form loyal, long-term partnerships, and travel in large family groups. Like crows, my family moves as individuals and as a group: we are always together and always apart, our movements governed by universal forces as much as by our own choices.

Making these paintings showed me the impermanence of not just individual lives, but of generations.  I saw the way each generation is born into a different set of causes and conditions, and each makes the world anew. The question "Who am I?” became “What is my moment?” I saw how the arc of my family resides within the greater arc of time. World War II shaped my grandparents, the bubble of seeming security after the war shaped my parents, and my life has always been shaped by the threat that nuclear destruction and the climate emergency will destroy all life on earth. At the same time, this moment offers the possibility of remaking the world in a way that sustains every life.

This existential dilemma reveals the second universal organizing principle: interconnection. Every single thing is connected to every single other thing. The climate emergency is the ultimate illustration of the powerful truth that we are all in it together--- and that we includes not just humanity, but every living thing on earth.

My most recent body of work addresses the climate emergency and the interconnection it reveals with a seamless world of people, animals, and place. Humanity is inside this web of life, not outside or above it. To make these paintings, I have needed all the technical means many eras of painting have required me to learn: observation and invention; accurate drawing and gestural brushwork; realistic, three-dimensional form in space and flat, abstract shape; overarching shape architecture and nuanced detail.

I use the synergy of unifying these opposing forces to search for a deeper truth, about myself and about existence. Hineni: here I am, at the balance point between past and future, honoring my ancestors and celebrating my descendants. Here I am, doing the work that is mine during my brief time on the planet: sharing my gratitude for the ongoing mystery of being here at this key moment; using the mighty force of painting to join with others to repair and remake­­ the world; rediscovering, every day, my connection to myself, and to everyone and everything that is, that was, and that will be.