I have been a member of EES Arts, a professional printmaking cooperative, for many years. Periodically, we produce group portfolios, each with a theme meant to be interpreted by the artist in a personal way. We recently completed a portfolio titled "Lighten Up."

The timing of this could not have been better for me. For the past few years I have been working with imagery inspired by the Dead Sea Scrolls, the tension in the Middle East and my mother's music. A dominant motif that exists in the work is a photograph of a sculpture that I took while visiting the Golan Heights. It is a life-size soldier pointing his gun out toward Syria. There is a great deal of tension between the violence that this suggests and the beauty that my mother's music embodies.

This is why "Lighten Up" was well timed. My Artists' Books and prints have evolved into a more playful series of mixed media works on paper. There is now a different kind of tension taking place in this new body of work: the seemingly disparate images join to create a world far from the violent nature of what is unfortunately still going on in the world.

Purge
16" x 24"
Digital print on archival paper
2011