From an email to the family...
….so what I want to tell you about is not the anxiety of what I haven’t been able to do easily (as a “techie), but rather what I’ve been immersed in with relish, and with privilege while these (non-objective) paintings infuse my psyche/soul with the guts and passion that came from inside out over 60 years of Mom’s life. As I clean these images up and organize them in a way to see them as an evolution of her process, I think about how we’ve so often regarded her landscapes as her “masterworks”, but these non-objective paintings are the other side of her eye. Where the landscapes drew the outside into our eyes, these draw her insides out into the world where we reflect on them through our own emotion. Like listening to a symphony or a folk tune, we ride the waves of her practice, her struggle and her momentum that spilled onto these surfaces. They were passionate, but so very deliberate and so expressive of her own tumultuous or contemplative psyche. And these are only the paintings. There are a couple hundred drawings, not yet photographed that do the same, and reveal that lifelong juxtaposition of her emotional entanglement with the forms and forces of nature. Those drawing will become another gallery, some time down the road when they can be brought back to daylight from the archives to be recorded. That photography process, too is a pleasure and a delight to SEE these marks from her days of great exploration and passion for making them!
For the public...
I ask you to follow the visual thread of these paintings. The chronology, size, etc are less important than to see the evolution of her fascination with the juxtaposition of line, color, space and movement...there was a period of pure passion, a period of delineation, a period of structural articulation (her “totem period” we like to say…). In all times her process was about her primal drive to assure that “all parts are related”. She often said it depended on whether what was going on inside or out was more important in her life at the time, but regardless whether she was working non-objectively or from a subject, the elements were the same. (see Gennie on painting)