May 2025:

The slow swirling satellite imagery of Hurricane Katrina, repeating on t.v., is seared into me. I remember, with fondness and fear, preparing for typhoons as a child, living on the 10th floor of an apartment building in Hong Kong. The balcony furniture and plants were brought inside. The tape we stretched in x’s over the windows had an acrid scent. In high school the air seemed to turn green, preceding afternoon thunderstorms in Connecticut. Birds quieted, the temperature dropped and a torrent was released.

I am enthralled by storms. The winds I have witnessed in Altadena have awed me, and aided in the total destruction of my studio and family home in the Eaton Fire. Over thirty years of art and life’s objects disappeared in a day. I had, taped to the wall of my studio, an image of a Louise Bourgeois drawing stating: “Art is a Guaranty of Sanity”. All the works produced for “the unknown”, at Shoebox, were completed post-fire and born of a need for such a guaranty.

I find calm, rhythm, and beauty when making. The slippery, uncontrollable nature of water media echos the subjects I am investigating: rememberance, lost objects, smoke, mist and inventing stories of home. Transparent layering allows one to see the strata of different painting days, remnants of my process. Having lost a great deal, it is as if I didn’t want anything else to get lost.

I have been working with urgency. Choosing to stick to the plan of having a solo show, after enduring such a catastrophe, has introduced some chaos into my work. My choices are born of the freedom of having nothing more to lose. I am at a crossroads. All around is the unknown.