SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

Though I never worked formally in photography, I maintained an active involvement with the
medium through informal study and practice. Years ago, I read John Berger and Jean Mohr’s
Another Way of Telling. Berger wrote, “Among the ancient Greeks, memory was the mother of
all the muses and perhaps most closely associated with the practice of poetry.” In all my work, I
have sought the poetic and worked to avoid the narrative; I have sought to honor memory by
using it as shape and texture along with other shapes and textures. I see “memory” as inspiring
the making of art as well as playing a significant role in informing the development of each
piece in particular; it is the subtext and story that underlies the formal orchestration of each
work.
Berger went on to write in the same essay, “Both the photograph and the remembered depend
upon and equally oppose the passing of time. Both propose their own form of simultaneity, in
which all their images can coexist. Both stimulate, and are stimulated by, the interconnectedness
of events.” I remember thinking this latter statement expressed my intentions as an artist,
as an artist/painter. As an artist manually orchestrating compositions, I wanted my work to both
“depend upon and equally oppose the passing of time.” I worked to assemble the formal
elements, to connect the seemingly disparate parts in such a way that “timelessness” was
achieved. Though guided by this ambition as a young artist, I felt my work most often fell short
of this goal.
Certainly, as I drew upon my personal experiences, it was difficult to assemble the parts of my
life into any kind of coherence or to use and somehow transform that experience in my
artwork. I grew up in the fifties and sixties in the shadow World War II, of the Holocaust and
the direct effects on our close and extended family. Dramas were sensed not articulated,
anxieties acted out, yet unrelated to the events at hand. Life on the surface was placid and
unrelentingly cheery, jarringly at odds with the currents felt running below. In adolescence, the
war in Vietnam was dominant, and as a young adult I chose to marry my high school
sweetheart. In my early to mid-twenties, I found myself living with his mental illness and,
ultimately, his suicide at the age of twenty-six. The paintings, prints and drawings in “Hysterical
Fugues,” my first solo exhibition at the Bromfield Gallery in Boston, spoke to these
experiences, to my desire to bring order out of chaos, to honor memory, to make meaning
through making art. The subjective, dream-state images of those paintings, prints and
drawings, of the mixed media work of the period, concerned the orchestration of dissonant
elements, of abstracted figures and landscapes that spoke to these personal experiences.
The upheaval in my twenties was followed by a period of productivity and relative calm in my
thirties. I remarried, had children, taught full-time and worked in my studio. I began taking art
students to Italy each summer, and in 1986, established a small non-profit organization
dedicated to visual arts study abroad. During the next ten years, I served as the Director of our
Summer Intensive Studio programs in Trieste and Viterbo, Italy. One summer there, in Viterbo
in 1991, I broke my leg hiking around my favorite Etruscan site. Perhaps, because of this event
and my inability to “run around” in my usual manner, I abruptly, found myself confronted by
the Italian landscape and quite fascinated by the formal and expressive possibilities of working
directly on site. Throughout that summer and in succeeding years, I found myself moving away
from the earlier subjective imagery to a disciplined observation of the Italian countryside.
Engaging in this new “actual” rather than “emotional” landscape became an overriding
passion. Though much of the subtext of the earlier work is present in the landscape, these
paintings catalyzed a relearning of color, media and composition. Instead of the complex
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