When I created this small floral arrangement I thought of it as sculpture, like art made with flowers. I sewed the palm frond to itself to make it arc, and the beautiful flower and leaf came from my brother's garden.
This is Peach Rat, now renamed Anaharat for her qualities of the heart. She was a late but fine addition to the rats of Hanukkah and Christmas. Notice how the cast shadow of her head in this photo resembles Snoopy.
Pink Rat, Turquoise Rat, Green Rat, and Lavender Rat belong to special friends of mine. Here they are gathered for a group photo before taking a trip to their new home.
This is another rat portrait, oil on canvas 12" x 16". His crazy shorts are larger than most, and he struggles with an aesthetic challenge, but never the less, he enjoys a special place in the rat pantheon.
This is oil on linen, 30" x 40". I painted each of the children in this particular family when they reached the age of seven.
This is the first figure I made in India--I found these great seedpods that were just begging to be made into something. She was a little like a shadow puppet, tied together with green dental floss I had in my bag.
I made this figure from found objects while studying in India. The very interestingly shaped sticks that suggested knees and calves were the starting point, and everything else had to be gathered from the small courtyard where I was working and fastened together using whatever straw and string I could find there. The native women who were working in the garden nearby were delighted when I showed this to them. What were very familiar plant materials to them looked strange and new to me, and they laughed when they saw how I used them. We couldn't understand a word of each others language, but our common amusement bridged the gap. This was about 10" tall.
This is a portrait of Morty, the rat who is just a baby. Though small, he packs a huge intellectual punch. His stance is indicative of his unusual courage. Oil on canvas, 12" x 16".
nd almost four feet wide. They were a big part of my thesis show called Little Family which was based on tiny sculptures I made and used as models. Here I wanted to play around with scale, showing them against the baseboard and near an electrical outlet. I placed them each in a spotlight--it reminded me of reading The Borrowers with my son, a book about teeny people living their lives unnoticed in the normal-sized world. In the photo of the painting hanging at the show, notice the actual sculptures in the glass case to the left of the painting.
This is a combination self-portrait and still life painting. The central part of it is of everything reflected in a tall rectangular mirror in my studio, with me surrounded by all of the stuff it takes to paint. There are not only the materials of painting, like palette and paint and brushes and canvas (the depicted canvas is the actual canvas of this painting) but also some of the objects I have painted, like bird's nests. It also contains a few portraits within a portrait, and other clues about my life at that time, if you know how to read it. It is oil on canvas, 30" x 40".
This is a small oil painting on panel, 12" x 12". I challenged myself by including all kinds of objects, with a variety of textures and surfaces, in the set-up.
This is a small oil painting on linen, 9" x 12". I painted it after seeing a still life with peaches at the High Museum in Atlanta. I wanted to see if I could make the surface of the peaches look properly fuzzy.
I painted this while hiking along the Maine coast on Mt. Desert Island with a friend. I had a small paintbox with me and when we took a break to rest on a rocky ledge I quickly recorded the beautiful view. This is 8" x 10", oil on panel.
This is an oil portrait of a 4" figure I made out of clay, wire, and cloth. It was part of a small family of figures I made as part of my graduate thesis project. I sculpted the figures and created environments for them and then used them as models for paintings. This painting is 12" x 14", oil on raw linen.
This is a large oil on canvas, 40" x 60", one of a series of underwater paintings. For many of these I photographed the subjects in a swimming pool using a disposable waterproof camera.
This is another found object sculpture made from scrap metal splashed on the ground during pouring. It's about 8" x 8".
Two more watercolor paintings of bird's nests.
Stepping Chicken is only 1/2" tall, made out of a piece of left-over metal that splashed on the ground during a pour at Georgia State University's sculpture department. I made a huge series of these found-object pieces, but this is one of my favorites. I like his jaunty, self-confident swagger as he steps off into the abyss.
This is oil on linen, 30" x 40", one of a series. The setting is the Chattahochee River, which is a favorite location of mine for portraits.