Over a number of years my grandmother, or as we call her in our family Baba, has allowed me to watch her age, exploring her image with various media on canvas, paper, and plexiglass. These intimate portraits reveal Baba’s complex and ever changing nature. As in jazz variations multiple colors resonate with her shifting moods: black, blue, pink. Baba was born in 1917, her wrinkles tell a story of a long journey from the age of carriage and horses to that of cell phones. I painted her hands swollen from arthritis caused by washing with snow during World War II. I painted a ring she designed many decades ago for her then beautiful hands, residing now as if on a twisted branch, no longer able to remove it, the ring has grown to be a part of her anatomy. Most of all I painted her gray eyes that are shiny and blue when she recalls her happiness and dull and gray when she ponders the downfalls. This is my Baba, but she is also an archetype, a cornerstone, and a galaxy.

Exhibition premiered in 2003 at the Patricia Correia Gallery, Bergamot Station, Los Angeles.
On view in 2014 at the Highways Performance Space & Gallery, Los Angeles.