These small works seem to be the opposite of heroic monuments erected to commemorate public events, that are attracting so much controversy today. Instead of singling out one ‘winner’ and leaving out all the complications, ambiguity, discomforts, failures, and multiple players, including the unintended ones, these paintings refer to the inherent risks, poignant efforts, lost and found predicaments in life. They are autobiographical, and an autobiography of life on earth. It is often hard to know what is right or wrong. There is nothing wrong, in spite of there being awkward relationships.

There is a hierarchy of the senses, and of sensory input. Therefore, the words on the frames of these paintings are rendered less vivid, so that they will not visually dominate the image. The narrative of the image is conflated and confusing, so as not to intellectually dominate attention from the puzzle patterns of the colors. In this way, disappointment and enchantment, danger and comfort, friend and foe are harmonizing in a delicate balance, inhabiting the same space. The cheerful colors belie tales of tentative connections, and struggles.

The box forms of the substrate for the paintings emerge off the plane of the wall and impose themselves into our air. They beckon to be picked up and handled. The phrases evolved as necessarily as did the images. Some words had to be made up, spelling altered. Declarations became enigmatic propositions that challenge, comfort and tickle us. These paintings have lived and traveled a lot, acquiring a wabi sabi patina from experience. The wording evolved as necessarily as did the images.

“I wanted to please myself, amuse myself, as Inuit art, Bill Traylor and Jacob Lawrence amuse me, – folksy, and embodied with insight into creature nature – and serious. In my life I have been absorbed by the necessity of tolerating uncertainty and contradiction, and how that is an aspect of peace-making – the paradox of struggle and affection, love and conflict. One cannot insist on blotting out essential elements, or favoring a single rendition of events, such as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Life must be taken whole. In the first in this series, the figures filled every pinhead of space in the frame. Then there appeared bright and promising light through gaps, but it was behind them. In the later works, the figures began to occupy the light of the space.”

The artist found herself bonded to these paintings for almost a decade and a half, throughout major life changes. They would not be completed, nor would they let her abandon them. “I felt I was having to become in order for them to be able to become.”