I have been an artist all my life, expressing in art my many other interests. My formal preparation began with art school and NYC’s High School of Music and Art and continued with a variety of college courses ranging from medieval literature to Picasso and astronomy, i.e. a rich grounding of ideas from which art could grow. A master’s degree in art history provided a firm footing and a deep understanding of the arguments and impulses of 20th century art. The master of fine arts in painting came later, after I was already teaching in similar program.
At 26 I exhibited mixed media constructions that started on the wall and traveled to the floor, reversing the Renaissance concept of a window in a wall. While my heroes were the abstract expressionist explorers of the sublime, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, this work reflected my gleeful reaction to Frank Stella’s shaped paintings in his Museum of Modern Art exhibition.
I am a hedonist: a synesthetic colorist who vibrates in harmony to “Fantasia”, Kandinsky, Bach and Milhaud; who appreciates the colorful rhythms of African drums, Barnett Newman, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. I have sought to understand existence through mathematics, astronomy and religion. At the same time, I have been pulled into the quotidian by motherhood, questioning society’s faults and celebrating the riches that I have bequeathed my son.
So I have moved from constructions to painted mathematical fantasies to pastel landscape and political paintings and installations. For the last few years I have been working first with mixed media (the Diatopia series) and now with Photoshop, glorying in the mathematical iterations of form ranging from the microbiotic to the macrobiotic. I suppose I seek the “Universal Theory of Everything” all the while enjoying the manipulation of color and form that supply the joy of all.