My fascination with relationship, communication, personality, and the unconscious crystallized my career as a psychotherapist, took me all over the world, and led me deep into the emotional landscapes of self and others. At 19, however, as I embarked on my very first journey abroad, I was given a camera. Over the years, photography has provided a vehicle through which I could chronicle my passion and respect for people and place.
After years as a ceramist, I discovered painting in the ’90s, when I studied in Bali under the tutelage of two master painters, Pak Mokoh and Galuh. Then in a workshop taught by Holly Roberts, I began painting on photographs and extending them. Combining these two medium seemed to open yet another door into the essence of my subjects. I remain hopeful that through my lens and a sensitive use of the brush and color, I am honoring the character, spirit, and struggle of those exquisite people I have been fortunate to meet on my travels.
I believe that my compositional decisions are informed by my work as a therapist—breaking through, or peeling away layers of context and content as the individual arrives in a place of clarity, where purpose and intent becomes knowable.
In 2000, the Chinese women I had photographed in 1982, many of whom had bound feet, inspired my first mixed-media series— Chinese Women: Bound and Determined. The secret nature and pathos of their unique suffering, and the dignity with which these women carried their plight moved me. I wanted others to see them as I had. In order to highlight their humanity, I added paint to enhance the colors and atmosphere surrounding and supporting the photograph.
The Balinese series—Bali: On Sight/Insight—sprang two years later from my twenty-year connection with the culture and spirit of the people of Bali. The Balinese approach to music, art, and dance has been pivotal in my creative development. During the summer of 2002, I photographed and painted on site in Bali in the hopes of documenting village life and the complexity of the Balinese character.
My next series, Altered Egos: Halloween in Santa Cruz focuses on this beloved and joyous holiday and our innate desire to use our creativity to embrace and/or explore different dimensions of character and persona—our own, as well as others’. After those paintings, I made a marked departure from personal landscapes and turned my attention to the American landscape itself. Inspired by a commercial plane flight over the salt flats of Utah, I painted a series of aerial portraits, Window Seats, based on and incorporating photographs I’d taken from window seats. Looking down on the Earth and seeing the design elements in nature, as well as those created by human intersection with nature, has been an exciting new arena.
Then in the last 4 years, using multiple photographs in conjunction with paint, I have created a series of moment-in-time images that capture the visceral and evocative experience of riding the New York subways. As an NYU student, I rode the subways of New York. In this subterranean landscape, the intensity of being in a crowded train was both frightening and exhilarating. Touching elbows, yet avoiding eye contact, I mingled with fellow commuters of every race, nationality, class and age. So close, so distant, so public, yet so private. I loved the equalizing nature of the subway, though I would never have dared pull out a camera back then. Now, years later and a California resident, photographing and painting the subways reconnects me with my urban past. My most extensive series, Subway Reflexions, is an attempt to capture the motion, the chaotic calm, and the confused serenity of the subway. Incorporating reflections, I utilize the windows, the darkness of the tunnels, and the vitality of the platforms to create complex and shifting layers of reality. Mesmerized by the enigma of people in motion, and the passage of time, I strive to capture and communicate some of these complexities in each of my pieces. So often our minds filter out the multiple layers of pattern and design, which surround us. The reconstructive nature of my work depicts the dense reality, which only briefly registers in our unconscious minds. My process, which is photography-based and painted in a photo-realistic style, starts digitally as I sort through my photographs and select 3 or 4 images that will work well together. I print and then collage these photos onto a prepared wooden panel. By painting around and between them, I create an imagined vignette, and materialize a moment-in-time-experience that holds the viewer in multiple realities at once. I call this time-lapse photo-surrealism. My hope is to evoke a visceral experience of this dynamic underground world, which represents such a cross-section of humanity.
In this past year, I applied the same principles to a variety of architectural subjects, and most recently to natural landscapes photographed in Germany and the Czech Republic, captured from the passenger seat of a car as we whizzed by.