My first work was realistic oil on canvas, portraying family, friends, and landscapes that carried emotional memories.  I still paint.

In 1982, while I was planning my M.A. show, we received a letter from a cousin in Russia, the only surviving member of my Mother’s family there.  I needed to work on a Holocaust project.

Silk fabric is always warm to the touch.  I used Chinese ink to dye the silk grey, to symbolize the people lost.  I hung parallel strips of barbed wire horizontally - the widest were eleven feet wide - and wove the silk vertically among the wires, along with odd shapes of dull aluminum.  The tops of these constructions hung nine feet from the floor, and some of the silk draped as far as the floor.

Two years later, I was visiting with Glenna Luschei, a poet and long time friend, in my studio.  She suggested we do a book together.  Between then and 2006, we did five different books in editions varying from thirty to fifty copies each – a total of 220 books for which I made 880 linoleum prints.  In thinking about how to print multiple colors, I remembered that Edvard Munch had already solved this problem.  He cut his original wood block apart, inked a different color on each piece, and assembled the image on the press like a jigsaw puzzle.  Using this method, I was free to use many colors in each print with accurate registration. 

Glenna and I based our book “Wind Machines” on our life stories, which wove together in Iowa, West Texas and California.  Part of the fun was printing a locomotive light blue, and making a stalk of corn (Iowa) metamorphose into a palm tree (California).  Two of our books were Glenna’s translations from Spanish of “Polyphemus” (the mythical Cyclops story) and “Enigmas” by the Spanish nun Sor Juana.  “Enigmas” combines Sor Juana’s writing with linoleum prints depicting events in her life.  Printmaking for me has been a source of much experimental and imaginative work.