About my recent work

My subject matter as an artist has almost always been the domestic: my friends, family, and pets interacting in various interior and exterior spaces.

After my mom died a few years ago at the age of 89, I did a series of drawings and paintings of her as an old woman and then as a glamorous young mother. In my painting The Summer Before the Fall, I portray her sitting around the kitchen table, enjoying a visit with my two young adult children, when she was still living in the house where I grew up and where she lived for almost 50 years. In Over the River and Through the (Schuykill) River, I portray my mother a couple of years later during another visit with my children, after she’d moved into an assisted living apartment. Traveling back in time, my painting Madame O shows my mom dancing with my uncle at a party in the early 1960s, wearing a black sequined miniskirt. (The title is a reference to Sargent’s painting Madame X, whose original version created a scandal because the delicate strap of the subject’s black dress was sliding off her shoulder. The title also alludes to my mother’s delight when people told her she looked like Jackie O.) My painting The Three Sisters-in-Law shows my mother and two aunts a few years later at a garden party on our flagstone patio. (The title is a reference to Matisse’s various paintings called The Three Sisters.) My mom and aunts eventually got divorced from their respective husbands at the time, but all three sisters-in-law remained friends.

After I finished my series about my mother, I started making drawings about my own years as a young mother and about my two children and husband over the past few decades. I didn’t make any figurative art during those years, and I wanted to reclaim the everyday experiences that I hadn’t documented in real time. Many of these drawings are set at a cottage on a lake in northern Wisconsin. I have also been making drawings of my family that are set at our home in Philadelphia during the last few years. Recently, I’ve turned my attention back to my college friends as young women, and I’ve made a couple of drawings set at a backyard wedding.