It is always about the paint and the strokes: Thick muted colors of oil on pure linen, fast florescent gouache washes on Fabriano paper, quick small detailed oil strokes on instant Polaroid film. The touch and sensation of the stroke and paint come together with the emotionally-based content which takes me inside the edges of my work. I once painted portraits of the elderly women chatting away in Yiddish, relics of a dying culture, who sat on the beaches of Venice, California. Seeing and hearing them there every day evoked the tortured figures of people, my people, minutes before their extermination in the Nazi camps.  My work continued with the imaged memories of the row after row of boxes rising up to the ceiling in my grandfather’s century-old wholesale dry goods store.

Many years later, in a new period of my work, these tall boxy images returned in paintings which focused on dwellings, dumpsters and displacements camps. The repetitive use of circles and squares dominates much of my painting and sculpture in what may be an unconscious effort to create a calming balance.

For several years, white, soft cork imported from Asian wetlands provided me with the material for a relentless drive to cut and build sculptures. Then, it was ping pong balls which I covered with graphite drawings and assembled on a moveable conveyor belt which helped buffer my grief after a death and to move forward. While I was at a residency in Venice, Italy, a boat sling hanging gracefully above the waters of the Grand Canal became the inspiration for a series of flow images devoted to examining continuous, elegant motion.

This is what I do. I take an image and I repeat it with every medium that I love until I exhaust it. Among my subjects: potholder loops, a striped juice glass, New York City dumpsters, life jackets and displacements camps, and old shoes left behind. It is now 2020 and the world is in the grips of a brutal pandemic. Living in New York City and homebound, I began exploring the painting of still lifes. This has evolved into my “farmer’s market” series featuring fruits and vegetables, painted in gouache on recycled brown paper bags.