My husband and I spent two months in Manhattan in 2014, soaking in the rich cultural brew of that fierce and exuberant city.  Having little space, and no access to ceramics facilities, I developed a series of small paintings on  paper.  The medium is colored pencil and casein, an opaque water-based paint whose brilliant colors and matte finish are very satisfying to work with.

 

The difficulty of focusing my thoughts in a stimulating new environment, blocking out street and construction noise, and the inner chatter of an overstimulated brain, led me to take on a consistent discipline: each day, I chose a word at random from the book I was reading, and used the letter forms as an armature to anchor an abstract composition.  The meanings of the words occasionally leaked in, but for the most part the word is simply a formal device.  A few other, looser abstractions followed (the Mapping the Brain of the Artist series).

 

For me, these small, dense abstractions convey some of the compressed energy of that very special time period.