Paintings
“Daylily Diptych”
Acrylic and pastel, on handmade paper, on panel. 12” x 24”
2022
“A Few of Them”
Acrylic and pastel on handmade paper. 23.5” x 49”
2021
“Jade”
Acrylic on rice paper, on panel.
2022
“Peonies”
Acrylic on rice paper, on canvas. 30” x 30”
2020
“If They, Too, Could March”
Acrylic on panel.
“If They, Too, Could March” in assemblage.
“A Shrine to the Quahog”
Ground.
COLLECTIBLES
by Katha Pollitt
Even jumbled here in the schoolyard rummage sale
they keep their spirits up. This battered tin
combination cheese-and-nutmeg shaver
still offers “ ‘Greetings’ from Fort Lauderdale,”
this bunch of velvet violets breathes a pale,
still shocking scent of lingerie, and here
( but where’s your mate? your shiny silver cap? )
is—can it be?—the purple jug-shaped blown-
glass saltshaker from my parents’ breakfast table.
A manic friendliness infuses these
things that mostly look like other things—
the tomato that holds thread, the black-and-white
kitten teapot, one paw raised for spout—
like toys that in a child’s dream play all night
or like the magic kitchens in cartoons
where pots and pans leap down from the shelf and dance
and the orange squeezer oompahs like a tuba.
Innocent, foolish, jaunty, trivial,
small travelers from a land that thought it was
so full of love and coziness and cheer
the least things shared in it—why should
they pain us so somehow, who know so well
it wasn’t like that, not really, even then?
Is that what they have come so far to tell us?
That we lose even what we never had?
On Collectibles:
Some years ago, I fell in love with the idea of “found still-life” as a subject for my work.
Encountered in antique shops, flea markets, or my own long unopened drawers, this has been fascinating. Curious combinations of objects purchased on trips, lovingly saved from childhood, carefully collected, or lost by one and rescued by another have provided provocative puzzles to paint.
Initially drawn to troublesome arrangements that included figures drawn from our history of slavery or of indigenous peoples, I simply painted them. Now…despite a lingering childhood sentimentality, and short of using an exact-o knife, I’ve “edited” them with glue and scraps of shopping bags. Let the tags hang freely from Donald Duck, from bells, doorstops, and banks. I confess to a few exceptions where I’ve fallen too much in love with my subject.