I am interested in modernist sculpture and how artists distort (Picasso), elongate (Modigliani) and simplify (Brancusi) the human head.

These two pieces carry on modernist aesthetics and are examples of :

Reduction: discovering what is essential by simplifying the form.

Accumulation: discovering what is essential by adding, marking, and transforming the surface.

Form and expression in the highly texturized piece

The strongest feature is the relationship between the face’s relatively recognizable structure and its active textured surface.

The eyes are closed or nearly closed, the mouth is restrained, and the expression seems inwardly directed. The face does not appear to be engaging an external viewer. Instead, it suggests a consciousness absorbed elsewhere.

The closed eyes become effective because they create a tension between the sculpture’s physical presence and its apparent withdrawal from the world. We can see the face, but we cannot know what it sees—or whether seeing is relevant to its state.

This gives the work a contemplative quality without making it sentimental.

The elongated nose and subtly modeled mouth provide a recognizable human structure, while the broad forehead and rounded head give the figure a monumental character.

Surface and accumulation of marks

The surface is the work’s greatest strength.

The small, beads were added to demonstrate the natural lines and textures found in nature. The repeated indentations create a visual rhythm.

In the more stylized piece, with a smooth blue glaze, that plays with the light, the face is simplified, but the elongated proportions, recessed eyes and modeled mouth preserve its humanity.

The sculptor asks, in effect, how much of a particular form can be removed, transformed, or reorganized while preserving its essential presence?

In the clay modeling process I add material, compress it, stretch it, incise it, or alter the relationship between volumes. Each intervention changes the object in space.

The face becomes not only an image but a physical event.

These two pieces remain figurative, resist realism and bring forth a modernist aesthetic.

My artistic practice is an ongoing exploration of perception, materiality, movement, and the mysterious relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. I am interested in the idea that perception belongs both to the beholder and to the work itself: I present visual elements, but the viewer’s experiences, associations, and imagination participate in determining what becomes visible and meaningful. I seek to create work that activates this exchange rather than dictate a single interpretation.

In painting, I work with ink, watercolor, and handmade rice paper, sometimes extending the original image through digital filters. I am fascinated by the luminous qualities of ink and its capacity to respond to different rays of light. On the irregular, multilayered surface of rice paper, ink produces a complex interaction of gesture, texture, and transparency. Digital filters introduce another dimension to this process. Intersecting with brushstrokes, color, and organic forms, they generate new fields of movement, disrupting familiar patterns and revealing unexpected relationships. The resulting images invite multiple readings, hovering between abstraction, landscape, and recognizable forms.

My mostly figurative ceramic sculptures pursue a related investigation through the human form. I am drawn to the modernist expressionist movements of Europe, particularly their willingness to distort, simplify, and transform the figure in order to convey something beyond literal appearance. Falling in love with Amedeo Modigliani’s work at eighteen left a lasting impression on my artistic sensibility. I continue to explore how a contemporary sculptural language can emerge from the tension between recognizable human presence and expressive abstraction.

My intellectual life is inseparable from my artistic development. I am continually learning, expanding my technical skills, and questioning the assumptions through which we understand art and experience. Theodor W. Adorno and the tradition of critical social theory associated with the Frankfurt School remain important influences. Adorno’s attention to art’s resistance to fixed meanings and established conventions resonates with my interest in ambiguity, contradiction, and the limits of perception.

I am equally interested in Jungian thought and neuroscience, particularly their different approaches to the unconscious, imagination, and the emergence of images. I wonder how artistic gestures can arise before conscious intention fully understands them, and how viewers recognize patterns, faces, and forms within ambiguous visual fields. My developing interest in quantum mechanics and the physics of fields extends these questions toward the larger mysteries of matter, energy, and the cosmos. I approach these subjects as avenues of inquiry rather than scientific explanations of artistic experience.

Spiritually, Reform and Renewal Judaism and Ch’an Buddhism offer distinct but meaningful perspectives on presence, contemplation, and the relationship between the visible and invisible. Together with my philosophical interests, they encourage me to remain open to uncertainty and transformation.

Ultimately, I do not seek to resolve these questions through art. I seek to give them material form. Whether working with ink on paper or shaping clay, I approach making as a continuing process of discovery in which material, gesture, intuition, and perception participate in the emergence of something not entirely known in advance.

As we move into the Jewish New Year, my thoughts turn to Kol Israel and to the frightening times in which we are living. Across many democracies, Jews are experiencing a resurgence of violent and virulent antisemitism. The hatred of Jews has not disappeared from the world; it has once again found new political forms, new languages, and new permission. I cannot enter this New Year without acknowledging that fear and without mourning the lives of Jews who have been killed simply because they were Jews.

My heart also remains filled with anguish over October 7, 2023—the horrific Hamas attack on communities in southern Israel that murdered approximately 1,200 people and took hundreds hostage. The deliberate murder, rape and kidnapping of civilians was an atrocity, and nothing can justify it. The grief of Israeli families, the trauma of survivors, and the suffering of the hostages and their families must not be diminished or forgotten.

And yet, Jewish mourning cannot require me to close my eyes to the suffering of Palestinians.

I am profoundly disappointed and heartsick over the Israeli government’s conduct of the war in Gaza and the continuation of the occupation. In the name of security and revenge, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Families have been shattered, children have been killed, homes and communities destroyed, and an entire population has endured displacement, hunger, fear, and profound humiliation. By 2026, the reported Palestinian death toll had risen well beyond the 60,000 deaths that once seemed almost unimaginable.

I cannot accept the proposition that Jewish safety can be secured through the destruction or dehumanization of another people. Nor can I accept the idea that criticism of the Israeli government’s policies is antisemitic. To oppose antisemitism and to oppose cruelty toward Palestinians are not contradictory commitments. For me, they arise from the same moral imperatives: the refusal to treat any human being as disposable and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

What troubles me most is the growing power of religious fundamentalism and authoritarian nationalism. Too many political leaders continue to perpetuate cycles of war and violence, appealing to fear, tribalism, religious absolutism, and patriarchal authority to build powerful constituencies. They promise security while directing enormous public resources toward militarization and war. They encourage us to see our neighbors as enemies and our differences as threats.

This is not the future I want.

The lessons of Jewish history should make us profoundly suspicious of absolute power, authoritarianism, and the dehumanization of the Other. Judaism contains within it a powerful tradition of argument, questioning, ethical responsibility, and resistance to idolatry—including the idolatry of political power. The shofar calls us not simply to remember, but to awaken.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to look inward: What have we done? What have we failed to do? Where have we become hardened? Where have we allowed fear to replace compassion?

As we enter another year, I pray for a Judaism—and a world—that can hold grief without turning grief into vengeance; that can defend Jews and Israel without denying Palestinians their humanity and a homeland; that can resist antisemitism without becoming blind to injustice; and that can seek security without sacrificing compassion.

May this New Year bring us the courage to reject the politics of hatred, violence, domination, and perpetual war. May we refuse the seduction of authoritarian power, wherever it appears. And may we remember that the preservation of one people’s humanity can never require the destruction of another’s.

L’shanah tovah.

May the coming year be a year of awakening, justice, compassion, and peace.

Im thinking of the relationship of particles and quantum fields. Sometimes this level of analysis provides insights to my art, to the spiritual side of life, to the idea of relativity.

A boundary that looks fundamental at one scale can disappear at another.

One factor of this relationship is that seeing is always a matter of perspective.

There may be no privileged place from which we simply see reality itself. We construct different descriptions according to the distinctions we’re making.

That doesn’t mean “everything is subjective.” A measurement has constraints imposed by the physical world. But what counts as a particle, a boundary, a form, or even a separate object can depend upon the level and framework from which we are describing it.

In deciphering forms and patterns, one could argue that forms are what certain patterns look like when viewed from a particular scale and perspective.

And “in always becoming”, there are implications of transformation, to this point, it isn’t necessarily “one thing becoming another thing.” It can be a reorganization that, from our perspective, appears as the emergence of a different form.

My recent series of abstract ink paintings on rice paper emerges from an ongoing engagement with the Florida wetlands—not simply as recognizable landscapes, but as dynamic fields of energy, movement, transformation, and interrelationship. Rather than depicting a particular place, I seek to evoke the experience of being within a living system whose processes exceed what can be fully seen or understood.

The work begins in meditation. I approach the paper without a predetermined image or conventional sketch. Meditation becomes a threshold through which the painting can emerge. I allow my attention to settle while remaining receptive to gesture, rhythm, accident, and intuition. My process moves between conscious intention and subconscious action.

I work with ink and water on rice paper, responding to the absorbency and fragility of the surface. The paper does not simply receive the mark; it participates in its formation. Ink spreads, pools, penetrates, stains, feathers, and sometimes escapes the control of the brush. I work rapidly and gesturally, drawing upon an action-painting approach in which the movement of the body becomes part of the work. I am less interested in recording the drama of the gesture than in entering a state of heightened attention in which gesture becomes a form of listening.

The painting develops through an exchange between intention and contingency. The work becomes a conversation between what I intend and what the material reveals. The unexpected is often where the painting begins to disclose its deeper possibilities.

David Hinton’s writings on Tao, Ch’an, and Chinese landscape painting have also profoundly influenced my approach. His emphasis on the interpenetration of form and emptiness offers a way of understanding the wetland not as a fixed object but as a process of becoming. In my paintings, emptiness is not simply the unpainted portion of the paper. It is an active presence—a field through which forms emerge, dissolve, and remain connected. The white of the rice paper can suggest mist, water, atmosphere, distance, or an opening into what cannot be named.

This connects with my interest in qi: movement, breath, energy, and transformation. The brush becomes an extension of breath. A stroke carries the movement of the body into the surface, while water carries the ink beyond the limits of the initial gesture. What appears to be a static image is therefore the residue of movement. The painting records a process rather than a fixed state.

My engagement with Theodor W. Adorno introduces a critical dimension. Adorno’s aesthetics resists reducing art to predetermined meaning or straightforward representation. His concept of nonidentity—the recognition that an object always exceeds the concepts imposed upon it—resonates with my desire to allow these paintings to remain unresolved. I want the work to preserve something of nature’s resistance to conceptual mastery. The wetland is fragile and persistent, visible and hidden, ordered and unpredictable. The paintings attempt to inhabit those contradictions. The absorbent rice paper, fluid ink, movement of water, limitations of the brush, and accidents of drying are not merely techniques for producing an image. They are part of the work’s meaning. Material process becomes a form of thought.

The wetland thus becomes both subject and method. Its shifting boundaries are mirrored by the painting process itself. Ink disperses as water moves through the paper; forms emerge from washes and gestures; each mark alters the meaning of those that came before it. Nothing remains entirely fixed. Each painting becomes an accumulation of decisions, accidents, pauses, and responses—a record of constant becoming.

I am increasingly interested in the possibility that abstraction can bring us closer to ecological reality than representation sometimes can. A recognizable landscape tells us what a place looks like. Abstraction can suggest how a place behaves: how energies circulate, boundaries shift, matter transforms, and visible forms arise from processes that remain largely invisible.

Through meditation, gesture, material contingency, and abstraction, I seek a visual language in which presence can arise from absence, form from formlessness, and stillness from movement.

Ultimately, these paintings are meditations on becoming. The wetland is continually becoming; the painting is continually becoming; and so is the consciousness that encounters it. I am not attempting to capture a landscape, but to participate in its unfolding.

Our brains, the wetlands, all matter, are not separate from the cosmos. They are the cosmos folded into living tissue. The atoms that compose our bodies and the swamp were forged in ancient stars. evolution assembled our minds into neurons, and experience continually reshapes their connections. Consciousness is not an intrusion upon nature from the outside, but one of its emergent expressions. Each mind is a local eddy in the universe’s continuous flow—a temporary configuration of matter and energy through which the cosmos briefly becomes aware of itself. Perception, imagination, memory, and art are not departures from the natural world but further unfoldings of its generative capacities.

Nothing in existence is fixed. Every entity is suspended within an ongoing process of becoming. We, as individuals, are continuously remade: cells regenerate, neural pathways reorganize, memories are revised, identities evolve. Humanity itself is a species in transition, shaped by biological evolution, culture, technology, and our ever-changing relationships with one another and with the Earth. Galaxies likewise are dynamic systems—stars and planets are born, transform, then die returning their elements to the interstellar galaxies, where new stars and planets emerge. The universe as a whole expands, transforms and generates new structures; the process is one of always Becoming.  Existence is less a collection of stable objects than an unfolding continuum of processes, relations, and transformations.

In this view, painting is not the representation of a finished world but participation in its continual emergence. Each mark records a moment in an unfinished process, where absence gives rise to presence and presence dissolves again into possibility. The image is never completely resolved because reality itself is never complete. The forest, the body, the galaxy, and consciousness all arise from the same ceaseless movement of matter, energy, and relationship. Art can make this movement visible—not by freezing it into certainty, but by allowing viewers to experience the living tension between formation and dissolution, order and openness, presence and the inexhaustible field from which it and we continually emerge.

The Barbarians Have Been Called
They come wearing many flags,
many scriptures,
many uniforms,
many languages—
yet always carrying
the same mission to dominate, to wage battles, torpedo and plunder the people.
They raid the homes of immigrants
before dawn.
Settlers drive families
from ancient hills and call possession
their God’s promise.
They proclaim themselves
freedom fighters,
holy warriors,
liberators,
while innocent women and children are excluded from the tunnels, where only the warriors are protected. The women and children are ravaged by their brutality.
Leaving only the grammar of grief.
These barbarian patriarchal leaders and their sycophantic politicians, preachers, and billionaires are raping, killing, or veiling women and girls—it is a learned hatred of “the other.”

The Barbarians march beneath medals,
maps, and empire,
And compete by sending the young
to die for their very old ambitions.
They praise hardness,
muscle,
obedience,
And mistaken cruelty
for strength.
Every age invents
its own barbarians.
Every age finds leaders paid by the billionaires
willing to summon them.
And always,
it is the innocent
who pay the price:
the child beneath rubble,
the mother searching names,
the old man carrying
the dead.
God—
if there are angels
still walking this earth,
we need them now.
Stand between
the hand and the weapon,
the order and the bullet,
the hatred
and the human heart.
Teach us,
before another generation is buried,
that no victory
built upon innocent lives
has ever been a victory at all.

The forests burn. The smoke
enters our lungs.

The billionaires
hire the barbarians.

The politicians
guard their gates.The patriarchs
call it order.

The cypress
calls it forgetting.

The rivers remember. The ash remembers. Every empire falls.

And The earth remains.

To see is to reflect—

to gather knowledge,

to approach an understanding

of the other.

Trees,

birds in flight,

flora and fauna:

all stand beyond us,

more than our names for them.

Social structures,

concepts,

and inherited certainties

cannot fully account

for how or why things are.

The ego seeks identity,

a fixed and certain world.

Yet greed,

ignorance,

dissonance,

and bias

leave us perpetually incomplete.

Poetry,

music,

and painting

open another way of seeing.

Ink and water

moving across ragged rice paper

become a lyrical field,

teaching us the materiality of things,

the conundrums and dialectics

of a cosmos forever becoming.

We stand within it

and at its threshold—

seeing,

becoming,

and seeing again.

Kandel explains why the mind must identify. Adorno explains why wisdom requires remembering that identification is never complete.

The brain survives by categorizing. Adorno’s aesthetics attempt to keep us attentive to everything that escapes the category.

The instability of nature and our perceptions

For Adorno, he approaches nature within a philosophy of aesthetics .

When you stand before a landscape—or a painting of one—you immediately begin organizing what you see into concepts: tree, flower, forest, springtime, beauty. This is what Adorno calls identifying thought. Concepts allow us to navigate the world, but they also distort it because no concept ever fully captures the thing itself.

The “unstable event of perceiving nature” occurs when perception exceeds those concepts.

A tree is never simply “a tree.” The actual tree possesses an irreducible particularity—its texture, history, relation to light, weather, soil, and surrounding life. The concept tree is necessary, but it leaves something out. Adorno calls this remainder the non-identical.

Theodor W. Adorno argues that authentic art can momentarily reveal this gap between concept and reality. In my paintings, An oscillating experience happens when we go from

“Those are blossoms.”

Then the blossoms dissolve into color.

“Those are trees.”

Then the trees become stains, brushstrokes, and atmosphere.

“This is a landscape.”

Then it becomes an abstract field.

The eye oscillates.

That oscillation is important because the painting prevents conceptual closure. You never fully arrive at “what it is.”

Adorno would say the work preserves the object’s non-identity instead of forcing it into complete intelligibility.

Nature as a Promise

For Adorno, modern people rarely encounter nature innocently. Nature is already mediated by culture, memory, science, economics, photography, tourism, and language. When we look at a forest, we do not see “pure nature.” We see nature through accumulated concepts.

Yet nature continues to suggest something beyond those concepts.

He sometimes describes this as nature’s promise—not a specific message, but an intimation that reality exceeds the social systems through which we organize it.

The lavender painting creates this effect. The flowers are present enough to evoke a field or garden, but absent enough to remain elusive. The image hovers between recognition and disappearance.

For Adorno, that hovering matters because it preserves mystery, and engages the viewer, without turning it into mysticism.

My work is grounded in a synthesis of Jungian psychology, feminist theory, and ecological critique, engaging painting as a site where inner psychic processes intersect with historically constructed systems of power. Drawing on Jung’s (1968) concept of the collective unconscious, I approach image-making as a process of emergence rather than control, allowing forms to surface through layering, repetition, and material interaction. These forms often evoke geological and biological systems—erosion, sedimentation, fault lines, and root networks—situating the psyche within the temporal and material conditions of the earth itself.

At the same time, this work is informed by feminist analyses of domination and hierarchy. The subjugation of both women and nature, structured through logics of extraction, control, and accumulation are part of my ecological feminist philosophy. These logics persist in contemporary fossil fuel economies, where geopolitical conflict, environmental degradation, and economic and gender inequality are intertwined. The ongoing instability surrounding oil supply chains—manifested in contested sites such as the Strait of Hormuz—underscores the extent to which global systems remain dependent on finite, unevenly distributed resources.

My paintings respond to these conditions not through direct representation, but through formal resistance to hierarchy. Compositions are structured as fields rather than centralized images, dispersing attention across the surface and undermining singular focal points. This place-based practice in contemporary art, as well as with ecofeminist calls for relational modes of understanding that reject binaries between human and nature, is where my landscape art lays.

The recurrence of mark-making in my work draws on ancient visual languages, particularly those associated with Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures that centered the feminine divine and earth-based cosmologies (Gimbutas, 1991). These references are not nostalgic, but speculative—gesturing toward alternative cultural and political forms that predate and challenge modern systems of domination.

Materially, the paintings emphasize process: accumulation, erasure, fragmentation, and reconfiguration. These gestures mirror both ecological cycles and psychic processes, creating a space in which dissolution and emergence coexist. The instability of form—its refusal to fully resolve—reflects the broader condition of contemporary life, in which extractive systems are increasingly unsustainable, yet remain deeply entrenched.

Ultimately, my work asks how perception itself might shift. If fossil fuel economies are sustained not only by infrastructure but by underlying cultural assumptions—about control, hierarchy, and separation—then alternative futures require not only technological change but changes in economic policy, education, and significant transformation. Through a practice that foregrounds relation, multiplicity, and material interdependence, I seek to contribute to this reorientation, holding open the possibility of more sustainable and equitable ways of being.

References

Gimbutas, M. (1991). The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. HarperCollins.

Jung, C. G. (1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.

Nike, bearer of wreath and wind,

bend your flight toward us.

Let the olive grow again in ruined courtyards,

let the quiet be stronger than thunder, and bombs; 

And let the world remember

that the greatest victory

is the one in which

no one must fall.

The earth is tired of armaments, arguments, and

tired of maps redrawn by rocket fire.

Cities breathe in broken rhythms,

fields remember the weight of marching boots.

If Nike, the bird goddess,  still has wings,

let her carry something gentler:

a hand unclenched,

a wall becoming an entryway, 

a road where armies once passed

now filling with children and market voices.

Teach us the harder triumph—

not the moment of defeat

but the long courage of repair:

stones lifted back into houses,

speaking without fear,

rivers running clear of ash.

Nike, bearer of wreath and wind,

bend your flight toward us.

My practice begins in stillness—the kind

taught by Hexagram 52 in the I Ching, the Mountain

within a Mountain: and within the Ein Sof, and with

the Shekinah, the ever infinite indwelling female

spirit, a mystery in stillness that is not empty, but

generative. In this stillness, I attune myself to

a deeper rhythm, one that moves not with

time, but with presence. It is here that the

painting begins, not with an image or concept,

but with a felt sense—an emergence from the

quiet.

From this inner ground, gestures arise like

Breath. I do not seek to

control this process, but to participate in its

unfolding, led by pulses of energy that hint at

ancient codes and unseen patterns, as Jung

might refer to as the collective unconscious.

The finished painting is not the art—it is

the residue, the echo, the exhale. The creativity is

in the act of becoming, as the Goddess culture

identified. In Hebrew it is translated as

“being.” In Ch’an Buddhism it is the silent

illumination.

Here enters the Shekinah—not only as a

symbol of the divine feminine but as the

indwelling presence within the act of creation

itself. Her presence hovers in the liminal

space between intention and revelation. She is the

breath in the silence, the fire in the pulse.

And behind even this—beyond symbol,

beyond name—Ein Sof, the Infinite, offers a-backdrop

of ungraspable mystery. Each mark is an echo of what

cannot be fully known but longs to be felt.

What emerges is not a finished statement but

—an invitation into— the mystery, where

viewers are asked not to interpret, but to

inhabit. Each piece invites the viewer to

approach the painting not as a thing, but as a

threshold—an invitation to stand before the

piece as before a mountain, or a flame, to

encounter their own stillness, to be within the

mystery.

This is my practice: to become still enough to

listen, open enough to receive, and bold

enough to follow where the current leads.