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first sight, 24" x 22" oil on canvas sold imagebook 
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first sight, 24" x 22" oil on canvas sold image
fallen, oil on canvas diptych, 2 16" x 12" panels, oil on canvas image
sphinx study #1, oil on canvas 12 x 12" sold image
less than fresh, oil on canvas 24 x 26" image
underworld, oil on canvas, four panels each 20 x 16" image
into action, oil on canvas 25 ½” x 28 ¼” image
unforgiven, 12 x 30" installed (irregular diptych) oil on canvas image
entitled, oil on canvas 2 panels, each 12 x 10" image
it's your ball, oil on canvas 12" x 12" image
(I've got a) bad feeling, oil on canvas 16" x 14" image
last dance, 14" x 20" oil on canvas image
breaking ranks-- the whistleblower, oil on canvas 16 x 12" image
Persephone's summer break, 12 x 12" oil/alkyd on canvas image
only traces, oil on canvas 14 x 10"  image
I wish, oil on canvas 48 x 42"  image
enter the myths, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown  image
childhood, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown  image
funny rain, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown  image
and now my angels have animal bodies, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown  image
ausland, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown  image
leopard, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown  image
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book

my life in Greek myth

pic artist statement

I had the opportunity to spend two years in Berlin, absorbing and reacting to German history and culture. This evidently has had some consequences for my work. My palette shifted, and my subject matter. Daily confrontations with difference caused a profound self-questioning introversion, and what I found inside changed my art. These paintings are the early results.

The Sphinx series rotates around the central symbol of a monster, a winged woman-lion. In Greek mythology, she haunted crossroads and demanded that travelers solve a riddle or be devoured. The Sphinx came strongly to mind while in Germany. When you are there, you just can’t get away for a single day from the riddles and wrong answers and tragedies of history. Also, I realized pretty quickly once I got there that the riddles are still much the same and the history is far from dusty. The struggles go on.

I expected WW2 and nationalism to be strictly off-limit subjects in conversation with new German friends. I was wrong. Germans of my generation really wanted to talk about these things and often the first conversation we would have of any real depth was about WW2 and contemporary German nationalism. Issues of identity, pride, belonging and exclusion, seem so nearly eternal. The more I learned about how German friends of my generation were struggling with these conundrums, the deeper inside myself I spun.

When I began this series, I had a sort of academic understanding of the Sphinx as a complex symbol which for some artists historically referred to the Irrational, an irrational so powerful that it can find expression in mass surges of scapegoating and murderous persecution. As I worked with the symbol it shifted and of course became personal. She became a symbol of a particular kind of crisis, one that cannot be avoided or navigated with any kind of glib intellectualizing. She represents the kind of crisis where what choice you make is pretty much the measure of what kind of person you are, and what kind of life you will have. Whenever I stand at a turning point, where a choice must be made and that choice matters in ways I cannot predict, she is there. And now she is sort of an ally.