I am a self-taught artist who began painting at the age of 43. Art came to me through illness. While learning to cope with debilitating pain, I began receiving persistent messages to paint. I wasn’t sure where they were coming from but now I understand they were the antidote, integral for my survival.

My work explores the feeling of brokenness—physical, emotional, and spiritual. I examine what it means to lose your identity to illness and trauma. To become untethered from the life you knew. To dissociate in order to survive, only to realize that perhaps you actually died in the process. Through this deeply personal healing journey, I explore how to gather and reshape the fractured pieces of myself into something more resilient, unimagined, and whole.

My painting process is very intimate. I spend months getting to know each of these beings and listening to their stories. I am immersed in the details of their physical bodies: how her eyelid crease leans slightly to the right, how her jawline disappears into her neck, how the cartilage in her ear is as unique as a fingerprint, and how the light on her lips can change her expression to reveal an emotion I didn’t see before. Simultaneously, I can feel my own body and emotions shifting, clarifying, deepening, releasing. I am co-creating with the energy of these beings and often I don’t know where they end and I begin. Sometimes I take photos of myself to use as reference when I’m trying to figure out how her arm should look, or where her neck should connect with her shoulder. This truly blurs the space between me and the painting. 

I use portraiture to convey the often overlooked emotional lives of women and to process heartbreaking and heart-opening events in the world. As a white Jewish woman raised in the U.S., I’m committed to elevating the representation of women of color in my work—to honor and celebrate the scope of beauty and humanity beyond the confines of whiteness.

By painting on bark, I celebrate the beauty of the natural world and my connection with it. Nature is where I feel the most peaceful and grounded. Among the trees, I feel my nervous system relax, my peripheral vision expand, and I remember how to breathe. 

My work invites viewers into a space of deep connection—to feel grief and suffering alongside joy and hope.