Transformation: Family

When I made these paintings, I had realized that though impermanence is constant, the world is not. Each generation is born into a different set of causes and conditions, and each person makes the world anew.  I, too, remake the world, fashioning it with the fundamental questions: Who am I? How can I find belonging, freedom, and meaning? 

Each generation of my Eastern European Jewish family answered these questions with its own organizing principle: it was G-d for my great-grandparents, security for my grandparents, the intellect for my parents. Now it’s my turn, and for me, it is painting. In these paintings, I am using images of my family to explore where I am and where I came from.

Birds are a fitting avatar for me, the daughter wandering Jews, of parents who moved away from parents who moved away from parents. The particular birds in these paintings are humble pigeons, crows, and doves. They are thought to be nothing special, or even pests, but they have miraculous qualities. Crows in particular are much maligned, but have remarkable intelligence and empathy. They form loyal, long-term partnerships, and travel in large family groups. Like birds, my flying people move as individuals and as a group, always together and always separate. We let go and hold on, our personal comings and goings governed by universal forces and geometry. The shapes of our movements create layers of space that create layers of time, in an unchanging cycle of lives arising and disappearing.

Each painting’s geometry explains the old stories once again: new shape relationships create new ways of understanding family relationships, which create new shape relationships.  As I work, the shape architecture of each painting and of the family relationships in it co-arise, continually revealing themselves to me. Each painting is another new discovery of my family’s shape music, with all of its harmony and discord.