The work in these galleries represents many years of making art, but it has always felt like an ongoing narrative – a process of coming to know, as I investigate my body’s life and transform it into art. I’ve tried to provide a sense of that process here.
My art is literally created by water, and imbued with its dynamics of movement, fluidity and flow.
The drops of floating colors spread out on the water’s surface as if magnified under a microscope lens, echoing the forms of nature. Transferred to paper, the floating imagery becomes the foundation for overlaid figurative drawing with charcoal, pastel pencil, and oil crayon.
At their heart, my investigations involve the nature of consciousness, especially the consciousness of and in the body. Through the unique circumstances of my life, I’ve gotten to know and feel my body from the inside out – tuned in to the proprioceptive, inner body sensors and signals through which we monitor our relationships with space, time, gravity, and all that is other.
Inner space (nerve landscapes)
To be in closer touch with what’s going on within, I draw my nerves at their tiniest endpoints, at the very places where feeling is being felt, or movement initiated. It’s at this level of scale that the floating colors imagery most closely echoes the forms of nature.
I ground my work in the real, drawing from bones and cadaver dissections in the Anatomy Lab at NYU School of Medicine, where I was Artist in Residence for many years, and from cutting-edge 3D radiology images of my own body made for my use as an artist. But my take on anatomy is personal and sensual, not medical. I work to evoke the textures of real flesh and bone, and reclaim the inner landscape.
Spinal surgery and a year in a full-body plaster cast, at age thirteen, was a life-defining experience. Years later, as the uneven pressure of gravity bore down on my vulnerable spine, making art became a compelling need. I embarked on an artistic investigation of my own body and its unusual anatomy.
On the drawing board - what I’m working on now
As I age, and gravity presses down on my spine with ever greater intensity, the quest to reconcile beauty with pathology grows more challenging. I continue to explore my body’s creativity, and its efforts to maintain balance, in the new work in progress on my drawing board.
Media, paper, dimensions, etc., and availability of original art and artist prints
This page features all the artwork from the site, arranged by gallery. You can click on the thumbnails to see enlarged images in a lightbox format.