Through my paintings , I trace my travels-from the cisterns of Istanbul to the frescoes of Florence to the tragic beauty that is India . There are turning points and mournings and moments of my own illumination as well as disappointments and dead ends and a deep fear of being a failure or a phony . My paintings depict the aura of life and art -of loss , desire , longing and death , memory and fragments of information . I have always been a journal keeper and suddenly I find that my paintings are journals , too .
Tutti Frutti , Encaustic , mixed media on panel , 20 x 20 inches , 2013
I was in Torino , Italy , sifting through books and maps and postcards at a flea market . I found a little school workbook from 1920 . When I took it to my studio later , I randomly chose a page to print onto silk . That was laid into the wax along with assorted items from that trip like a candy wrapper and a lovely museum entrance ticket . I worked and worked and it never said what I was trying to make it say . So I took white wax and blocked out almost the entire thing . As I scraped away little windows on the trip , the first thing exposed were two words from two separate lines in the school boy ’ s workbook . “ Tutti ” on one line and “ Frutti ” from the line beneath . My daughter translated the page for me . Incredibly , the random page I had chosen for my wax discussed the benefits of bees in Italy . “ They bring us honey and wax and all the fruits through pollination .” So , “ Tutti Frutti ” was born and I scrawled , “ il miele and la cera ” meaning , “ the honey and the wax ” in Italian on top of it all .