Magen David, the Shatkona Painting

Previously an art restorer, I now use a meditative painting process to create biomorphic labyrinths, single organic paths that tangle but are never blocked. I was raised in Bordentown, a small historic colonial-era village on the Delaware River, in the heart of agricultural South Jersey. I studied art materials and techniques at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. I then learned paintings conservation at a regional laboratory near Cleveland. I spent my working adulthood in California, in Santa Barbara and San Diego, in studios that restored paintings from all eras. After I returned east, a series of near-fatal health crises persuaded me to change careers to information technology and civic social relief. I married another paintings conservator, and now I live in Chelsea, on the Hudson River in Manhattan, in a high rise complex that houses more people than lived in the village where I was raised. (I know because I looked it up.) My own paintings were always figurative, until recently. Now, despite my Parkinson’s, I take solace in expressive abstraction. I rediscovered a meditative painting technique I developed as a teenager. I have never seen anyone else make paintings like these. If I have been influenced by anybody, it has been my younger, freer self. As well as all the painters whose works I held in my hands, under my care as a restorer. Also, I have always loved comic books, and the strong lines of the best comics may have informed my paintings. As a restorer, I would hover close to the surfaces of paintings when using a microscope, scalpel, or cotton swab. In my own paintings, I continue to work close to the surface and therefore use archival acrylic paints which dry quickly and prevent unwanted smudges. I try to avoid corrections, and sometimes incorporate happy accidents into the evolution of the design.