This is an oil painting on linen, 8" x 11". I was thinking about the complimentary colors of blue and orange, wanting to do something with such opposites.
This is a small oil painting on wood panel using as subjects the small figures I sculpted and placed in a dollhouse room.
Another portrait bust, life-sized, fired clay.
This sculpture is another life-sized portrait bust, the brother of yesterday's subject.
This is a life-sized portrait bust in clay. I got interested in traditional portrait sculpture a few years ago and was surprised to find out how easy it is compared to painting or drawing. Before attempting it I thought it would be more difficult, but I found that translating three dimensions into three dimensions posed less of a challenge than translating three dimensions into two.
This little guy was a bundle of boy-energy. He knocked his front tooth out as a toddler, and the skinned knees were a typical accessory to his active lifestyle. This is a life-sized oil on canvas, 30" x 40".
I took a very long walk along the beach at Hilton Head on a day that happened to be my youngest child's 18th birthday. Musing about motherhood, I saw a seashell fragment that looked exactly like a breast. From there I collected all sorts of bits and pieces of things, with the intention of marking the occasion by making a small sculpture. Thus, Fertility Angel was born. But there remained too many great shells unused; Fertility Demon was soon to appear. And appear she did, expressing a certain insanity which should be familiar to any mother.
This is an over-painted magazine photo, part of a series of paintings that I did after spending time on a cruise ship. The image of the orange life jacket kept showing up in many of these paintings, and these two figures seemed just right to paint into this weird photograph. I loved the way the woman's eye and the fish eye looked the same.
This is another collaged and over-painted magazine image. The water tower was a lampshade in the original photograph. I added the two standing figures and created a landscape through the door. This way of working is a little like dreaming in that you never know what's going to show up.
This is a large oil painting on canvas, 3' x 4', another unconventional portrait, this time of my son. I placed him in a small bathroom surrounded and actually crowded by colors and objects that represent femininity. I was thinking about how children outgrow us, about the idea that one of the main functions of a mother is to be left. I liked how his 6'2" frame barely fit into the tiny space, and how even though the light flooding in the window obscures his features it is still a very good likeness of him.
This is a large oil painting on canvas, 4' x 6'. There's an implied story involving the two women and the man reflected in the mirror. I was interested in the variety of light sources--the lamp, the blazing sunlight, the green glow from the television, and the softer window-light on the figure in the mirror.
This is another over-painted image. The base is an old album cover. It had a photograph of a tiger's head as well as a lot of words. I painted over all but three of the words and used one of the tiger's eyes as one of mine.
This is a collage painting, 12" x 12" oil on magazine photo, appropriate as we jump into a new year!
This is an unusual painting. It started with an assignment in grad school where we were each given a clump of earth and we were required to do something with it. I thought it was beautiful and I wanted to paint it. So I dissolved the soil away from the lower roots in order to expose them, and I used the resulting mud as paint. I painted the earth with the earth. Many paints originate from earth colors, taking their names from their place of origin, like Burnt Sienna, or Raw Umber, so this was a natural thing to do.
This is a life-sized oil portrait of a wonderful woman, one who was willing to sit for a portrait rather than requiring the use of photography to shorten the sitting time. We both thoroughly enjoyed the time we spent together in the process of creating this painting.
This is an unconventional self-portrait. My image is reflected in a tall vertical mirror in the studio and my face is turned away from the viewer. The contents of the studio are included, or rather the left-overs of the creative process--the trash can overflowing with discarded paint, the back of a stretched canvas leaning against the cabinets, the papers on the table. The headless mannekin and the faceless figure are related. I was thinking about being mindless (an oxymoron?) and about the ego involved in making a self-portrait. The heating duct growing out of my head amused me--it looks like the crazy hair-do on the Bride of Frankenstein.
This is watercolor and pastel, a combination of drawing and painting-- a river, a woman, a baby, and a bird. The baby is superimposed over the woman and they are both in the river, but separate and possibly moving in different directions. Both mother and baby are swept along and each are seemingly asleep. The bird, in silhouette, witnesses.
This is a large oil on canvas of a small drama, the kind of ordinary moment that occurs every day. The young man enters the room as the girl sits lost in thought. There is an implied tension. This is the actual subject of the painting; it invites the viewer to speculate about the relationship between the two figures and about the story they share.
In this 30" x 30" oil on canvas I wanted to capture the feeling of sensory over stimulation that happens in places like casinos. This was part of a series using images from a cruise ship. The life-jacketed man wandering in the background, the electrified witch-like woman playing the machine, and the man leaning into the picture are each isolated from the others, taken over by their surroundings, disconnected.
