I was considered a “Child Prodigy,” learning to paint and draw at first from my Grandmother, Livia (a survivor of war as a child who used art as a means to heal). I later took adult classes as a child at Parsons School of Design at 14 in Manhattan, New York, and attended a prestigious Cultural Arts High School in Long Island l for the gifted and talented during my sophomore and Junior years of High School. Everyone, aside from myself, was sure I would pursue the visual arts. However, despite having won awards and having my work displayed during college at the Amherst Museum of Art and at other small shows and museums, and an internship with the Brooklyn Museum of Art, I chose to pursue law for almost 3 decades, while continuing to paint and draw and raise my two sons. I am a Graduate of Smith College who attended Law School at Cardozo in New York City.

As a girl, the Art world scared me. I felt as though I would be swallowed up in the chaos of uncertainty, and found English Literature, Polical Science and Law fascinating. I decided to pursue law, working in public interest law until 2025, when I felt undeniably called back to share what is in my heart and mind. A teacher once told me, “You have a duty to share your heart.” And without heart, there is no art, without heart, we cannot see the truth of the matter. As my friend Lo wrote to me “Art is Law and Law is Art.” Without Love and Harmony, where would we be?

It is not through the eye that a painter sees their own creative self, but through her mind's eye and her soul, from the outside, the current life's age (and sometimes the projected future trajectory) back to the child within the center of where the journey in this life began. It is more complex if one remembers more than what is this lifetime. Sometimes it is a smell, or an energy that triggers the past life self to remember. Then that life sequence must unwind as well, and the Fibonacci sequence that would end at 0 is not "ground zero" but  another sequence, another life your soul recalls journeying through, even a crack in the door is enough to reveal another layer to who the full soul self emerging is.

While I could much more easily reflect the beauty and awe in another, seamlessly so....to convey the creative self wordlessly, each sand of time, summarized, and the travels beyond this dimension...

The fear of self being misinterpreted is an entirely futile exercise to even begin to entertain....

The “Portrait Of The Painter As Herself” (as well as much of my work) strives to convey the days and minutes behind the eyes, the journeys and hopes (travails and suffering and celebrations) at times, and my love for humanity; despite pain and hardships; to see the various sides as the dimensions of the human condition.  We all have our own path, we may become injured or  sick and broken along the way, but we struggle and love.

It is not about my likeness, as simply captured in a photograph (captured by He who loves me). But rather, in how I am making others feel.

In shielding myself, in exploration of the inner child, the memories, and the travels beyond the divide between time and space, I am not sure how to communicate the dimensional inner “self” yet perhaps connecting with dimensions beyond the self of this time and space requires a self silencing, an ego negation, so as to not disturb what we witness energetically, to fit through the door, much like Alice drinking from the bottle to become small (negating ego or self). I have learned in my 30 year hiatus from the eye of the beholder as what I was born to become.

I know that when an artist does not communicate clearly, she fails in her function and has limited herself. She may vanish in the closed world. When we consider art as a visual poem, or communion with the viewer (if it was just for me to see, it would be in my sketchbooks alone); you, the Viewer, who has a record / memory of the visual experience, the questions asked are often: Have I added one smidgen to my capacity to understand or evaluate the strange human adventure which I (and you) are part of, whether you, the viewer is comfortable as actor, spectator, or sufferer, since most people have been in all roles? Have I shared my experience with the viewer or shared a celebration of life, or shared an indictment of it? Have I helped the gracious viewer to a better understanding of what it means to be human?