After the Snow, oil on canvas, 24"x24", 2007

I also want to leave you with this painting, one of my personal favorites. I painted it one winter day two years ago, as the title indicates. Painting from life is my way of holding back a fleeting moment and all its ineffable particularities which I have no other way of comprehending or expressing. Chief among those qualities is light, of a particular season, weather, place, or time of day. By getting light right sometimes I succeed in getting temperature right. I feel that how things, especially ordinary, everyday things, look in light has a way of evoking shared memories. It was how I felt the first time I saw an Impressionist's painting on a magazine cover: I, a girl of maybe twelve, standing in an adobe in a Chinese commune, staring and feeling strange familiarity in the sun-dappled French courtyard depicted in that picture.