Until very recently I
juggled two professions: magazine editor and art director by day and painter
nights and weekends. The two parts of my life did not run on parallel courses,
but intersect and feed one another in illustration commissions, most especially those relating
to the poet Emily Dickinson. A decade ago I illustrated articles about Hebrew
influences in the poet’s work and about her relationship to the famous Master.
These paintings led to a commission for a film series, “Angles of a Landscape,”
produced by Ernest Urvater in collaboration with the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Using the 1846 daguerreotype as a jumping off place, I painted Dickinson in
varied situations and stages of life. In turn these works have led full circle
to new, conceptual narratives like the three-dimensional and lit piece, Zero
at the Bone, a response to the well-known
