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Every ambitious artist or academic wants to contribute something new; to spread open some little space in the envelope of understanding.  I came out of grad school in 1985 without a clue as to what that something might be. As a fellow grad student noted, I had a romantic idea about painting but nothing to paint about. 

 

Not letting this stop me, I moved to New York in 1986, got a place to live, a job and a subject.  In a grad seminar with Leo Steinberg I had argued that it was Braque, not Picasso, who was seriously interested in how we experience space and time (based on a subject matter count of each oeuvre).  I decided on this focus.

 

I did not discover anything new about our experience of space or time but that scaffold of intention was useful.  I did original work for the first time since I had embarked on my “romantic notion”.

 

I thought I was painting about spatial experience but really it was more about music.  I imagined myself a jazz musician playing the paints.  It felt like I had found my expressive instrument.  It was work of this era that was included in the Corcoran Biennial of American Painting in 1994.  A great honor.

 

A decision to go back to grad school in digital art in 1995 turned my attention to video installation and I spent several years working primarily in that medium.  This led to a delicious year as a Harvard fellow together with my friend and collaborator, Gillian Brown, in 1999.

 

We had spent two years developing work for a show that was due to open in 2008 when the show was unexpectedly cancelled and my husband had a devastating accident.  This cluster of catastrophes led to several years working outside of the art world.  I had personal responsibilities but I kept working because by this point, it was impossible for me not to.  I didn’t work with video but worked primarily with a variety of materials, photography and a large format printer.  Very little survives from this time as most was painted over, repurposed or destroyed.  The process was more necessary to me than the product, but my visual vocabulary deepened.

 

In August of 2020 (covid year one) my sweet mother died at 98 and I was freed.  I took off in an RV, settled down in a tiny town near the Mexican border (Ajo), rented a studio and got to work.  I have continued working full time since then and I now have a new body of work.  It continues in the tradition of my early painting but incorporates the vocabularies, tools and lived experience of the intervening years.  I think of the work as painting though there is very little paint involved. I think it fits within that tradition of visual language. I hope it contributes a little something to that conversation. tI feel it is the best work of my career.

 

I have a show opening in San Francisco in September.