Many years ago now, I was three quarters of the way through an MFA program when I quit. I’m a person who completes Everything—compulsive, a little bit of a control freak? check. So this was a bit out of character. Undergraduate vs: Graduate Unlike with undergraduate courses where you enter an area of… read more
Latest Posts
The Good News, the Bad News, and the Best News About Being an Artist
The Good News When I was a kid there were ads on matchbook covers, or in the back of women’s magazines that read DRAW THIS. Then you would send in your drawing to the address in the ad to see if you had talent. I made my drawing and sent it in. One day… read more
A Living Book
The Issue of Safety From an extremely young age, girls are told that they are not safe in the world. This message is reinforced in countless ways through the media, social interactions, school curricula, workplace protocols, and family dynamics. These messages come in many guises: stories about rape, stories about shaming due to difference or… read more
How Long Does it Take to Make an Oil Painting?
I returned to oil painting in 2003 after many years working on paper. At that time, I committed to going to my studio every day, and making at least one mark to keep myself going. The first painting I did, a close up of a snowy stoop in my Brooklyn neighborhood, took six weeks to… read more
Blunting the Impact of Negative Feedback on Your Work
It’s always painful when someone doesn’t like your work, or doesn’t respond in a positive way, or doesn’t respond at all. It happens all the time though. It took me many years to begin to differentiate between someone looking for a way in to what I do, and someone who just wants to stop me… read more
Using Oil Painting to Cope With Violence
Much of my work centers around staying creative in the face of destructive cultural forces. Being positive and living with vigor (rather than with urgency which often passes for vigor) is a challenge. Peanuts Recently I created two panels Peanuts and Walnuts that speak to events of horrific violence. The process of… read more
Really? Another Threads Painting?
I continue to make oil paintings of spools of thread, the latest being a small 8″ X 8″ painting I finished this month. Domestic Acts The thread paintings speak to a little bit of my own personal crazy (of which I have loads), my unabated passion for color and the ways… read more
Stupid Wet Tricks
One of the things I love most about working with oils is that the paint stays wet, and workable, for a long, long time. You can work on a painting for a few hours one day, and the next day you can radically change it by working into what’s already there. Or… You… read more
Painting to Feel Rich
I love the feeling making art gave me as a kid! I was mesmerized from the first moment I saw the paint colors and smelled the linseed oil. I loved setting up the wooden easel and the white painting panel, choosing my brushes, and figuring out what to paint. Need Versus… read more
Radical Oils
About ten years ago I returned to oil painting after decades working on paper. I had built a career working abstractly, making prints and collages, but I hadn’t answered the original question I had as a child—how do da Vinci, Raphael, and Manet make the world look like that? Never answering this question seemed like a… read more