I am very interested in discovering how my aesthetic vision is tied to the efforts of hard-edged artists in the past, such as Kazimir Malevich and Lázló Moholy-Nagy, as well as the works by nameless artists of different epochs.  Recently, however, I have had cause to reconsider the notion of “past.”   Works of early artists of the genus Homo, have recently been discovered in two cave complexes in South Africa:  Blombas and Rising Star.  In the first, “artist toolkits” and geometric engravings in red ochre, below, have been reliably dated at 73,000 years BP.  In the Ri ..read more

I’ve now painted long enough to know that the idea that inspires me, the photograph, the idea scribbled out on one of the little yellow post-its scattered around our house, may not resemble the finished painting at all.  But the knowledge of its origins contributes to my experience of that final image and is one of the ways an artist may understand their painting differently from most other viewers.   A recent painting offers a clear illustration of that.  It began with this photo I took several years ago at a local nursery.        Doesn’t it always feel lik ..read more

  The artist Keith Haring painted Silence = Death in 1988, the year he was diagnosed with AIDS.  He died two years later, age 30.  The pink triangle itself made reference to the cloth badge sewn on the uniforms of gay prisoners during the Holocaust.  The figures in his triangular painting refer to the Reagan administration’s well-remembered refusal to address the AIDS crisis.  The mortal consequences of that failure are legion.     The painting appears at the very end of the American Masters documentary on Keith, produced by PBS.  As an object, its su ..read more

During the decades I worked in hospice and palliative care, my husband Jim and I simultaneously lost a landscape of friends and acquaintances to AIDS.  During this uncommon exposure to grief and loss I would, every so often, repaint rooms in our home, heeding some call or need. I’d get a new color in my head and obsess over it until it was on the walls.  Creating a new visual environment was calming, a visually pleasurable change I could control in the face of so much cellular and emotional chaos.  Fortunately, Jim understood the connection and would help move the furniture ..read more

When I was recently invited to participate in a group exhibition of San Diego artists, the gallerist surprised me with a request to select items from my Shadowed Squares series for the show and exhibit catalog. "They're different from what others are showing," she said. They are, and they're different from the layered oil and cold wax paintings I've recently been working on, so it's been fun to revisit the intent and language of the squares. Shadowed Squares is a very pure conceptual series based on an essay I read when I resumed painting 9 years ago: In Praise of Shadows. In it, Junichir ..read more

I'm a member of a San Diego County artists' salon whose members meet quarterly to discuss new work and vigorously explore artistic viewpoints. This intellectual companionship has been invaluable to us because we all work alone. Three of us (Pat Kelly, Robert Treat and I) are soon holding an exhibition, titled "Still." During our get togethers, each of us has commented on the stillness that falls around us during the painting process. This is not merely a function of working solo, but occurs when a certain dynamic balance in a piece arises out of extended periods of quiet observation. We call ..read more

One of the fascinating things about my now not-so-new career is watching the connection between a painting and the person discovering and acquiring it. That happened yesterday with Nike, at the La Jolla Library. While the paintings are lined silently around the walls of a show like STILL, they are not inert to me. Each has a character and a creative history. They never fully resemble the sketches that prompted them, having their own voice in the coming-out process. Voice is not quite the right word, but the process of realizing the image is more a dialogue than a monologue, as much listening ..read more