THEME: EYES - Ontario/Canada/online
THE BACK STORY
TITLE: ICU
In 2020 while driving through an alley, I noticed a large canvas against a wall. I stopped thinking I could reuse the stretcher bars. Upon turning the canvas around I found a huge painting of a cat. Bringing it home I stored it away. The eyes of the cat captivated me. I couldn’t just paint over the original. But the eyes were like water drops to me.
On a very windy day, lots of palm try “dressing” or cluster littered my driveway. As I gathered it to throw out, I started studying the beauty of all the colors, textures, lines, shapes and as usual… I couldn’t throw any of it away. I thought maybe one day I’d find a use for it. Adding yet another saved “thing” to my storage, I might find a use for this section of my art storage tiny house, the connection between covid masking wearing-the cat canvas-the palm “trash” all seemed to click. ICU has become part of my covid art series and won several awards.
MEDIUM: MIX-MEDIA … UNKNOWN PAINT ON CANVAS
COTTON AMERICA FLAG MASK, PALM YARD “TRASH”
SIZE: 48”x 60” - 121.92cm x 152.4 - YEAR: 2020
THEME: HABITUAL - Los Angeles/CA/USA/online
THE BACK STORY
TITLE: WHAT’S LEFT OF MY HOMETOWN - Geismar, Louisiana
After moving, as a newlywed, to Los Angeles this painting was created. In subsequent journeys “back home” I always felt like the spider web. I found myself drawn to natural scenarios that represented what I was feeling inside… trying to find my direction, my center. Feeling the idealistic past rushing away all around me in LA I saw the “modern” world, but returning to Louisiana I saw the patterns of my deep roots. Created in 1977, symbolically, in this painting, I expressed being pulled in all directions. When going “home”, I saw crumbing wood, rusty metal, my known world trying to hold on, much like the spider’s web.
Looking into any web, I am pulled into the construction, the light bouncing off its many parts, its rhythm, what it’s attached to in its environment, what is caught within it. In 2025, I am still attracted to this part of my environment but for vastly different reasons. Now I experience it as the threads of connection.
MEDIUM: ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
SIZE: 36”x 36” - 91.44cm x 91.44 - YEAR: 1977
THEME: EYES - ONTARIO/CANADA/online
THE BACK STORY
TITLE: SUCIDE IS NOT AN OPTION
With advancing medical technology I have learned that I am considered “on the spectrum” as most, if not all, creative people are. It is my belief my life would have been very different with this information “back in my day.” I like who I am and despite medical technology, I’m glad to have become the person I am. This painting was in another composition in 2023.
About 1968-69, I found myself in a deep depression. I had strange headaches with lighting bolt type pain which radiated from the base of my neck to the top of my skull. It was terrifying. My mother believed it was because I was smoking grass. At that time, I thought perhaps I’d drive my car into one of the canals which was part of the Louisiana landscape as one way out of my pain. This painting was based on an image I saw from the movie Romeo and Juliette which came out just at the time I was introduced to my soon to become and now former, husband.
I found myself on the psychotic floor of a local hospital “because there were no beds available in any other part of the hospital”. As I’d just spent 7 years in a boarding school, I thought I’d never get out of this new forced confinement. My head hunt: I wasn’t insane. I painted while in my hospital room and wouldn’t speak to anyone for fear of saying something that would keep me there longer. Of all my friends who knew I was there, only my new friend, and later husband, came to see me and he did that every day. I looked on his as my way out of the hospital and a way to get away from my family. I didn’t know that the marriage that occurred a few months later was a Jewish community arraigned married and that I was going from one hole into yet another. All along I knew that “suicide was not an option” for me, not then nor ever.
MEDIUM: ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
SIZE: 48”x 60” - 121.92cm x 152.40 - YEAR: 1976
