Still-Life

I rcently *rediscovered* the still-life ink drawings and paintings of Richard Diebenkorn at the SFMMA exhibition,"Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966." This period of his work promted me to enroll at UCLA to study with him. In these works I noted, then and now, the balance of representational subject matter between still-life and landscape imagery. My approach to still-life explores allegorical, temporal and symbolic ideas manifest in the Vanitas tradition of still-life painting. This genre allows me to pair political commentary with personal experiences, as in the large painting, "Night View from a Window in Prague," 2022. This painting comments on the war in Ukraine and my Eastern European heritage.