For my first decade as a painter, I did not show my paintings to anyone other than my husband.  He could not avoid seeing them, as I was living with them.  A handful of people saw a few.  No one, I suspect, had a clue that there were dozens of them stashed away in boxes and closets.  I wasn’t painting for an audience. 

I was painting as an exercise in self-discovery, a personal challenge, a creative outlet, and a passion, perhaps even as a self-indulgence.  But mostly I painted because I liked the feeling.  Knowing what I was up to almost full-time for several periods each year, friends began to ask insistently to see some paintings.  I showed them a small sample.  Their reactions were positive and encouraging.  That was nice, but it turned into “let me introduce you to this gallery owner,” or “are they for sale?”  “Are you planning an exhibition?” Well, exhibitions are work, very hard work, I later discovered, and I did not want or need that task for sure.  But invitations to exhibit emerged. 

Often, when I am in a gallery viewing the paintings on display to admire and learn, I ask a question or am asked a question by the person in charge, and frequently that turns out to be the artist.  It does not take long for the person, based on my questions, to ask, “Are you a painter?”  For a while, I issued a non-denial, denial.  But that passed.  “Yes, I paint.”   Painters have a shared bond and understanding.  I like talking with most of them.

After a couple of years of people asking to see photos of my paintings, I took a leap by posting one a day on Instagram and Facebook, and experienced the contemporary phenomenon of instant responses.  Thumbs up or the occasional thumbs down, and some sharply opinionated comments.  People’s likes and dislikes were so varied. It was a reminder that everyone has their own opinions about the art they see and is not bashful about sharing them. It was rewarding to know that my work was bringing people pleasure, ideas, and emotions.  It was also a reminder that I was a bit late in appreciating the role of the audience in the experience of art.

Marcel Duchamp rightly and famously pointed out that the viewer is not passive and the audience actively creates meaning.  It took me years to come to his point that art is not finished until it is seen, interpreted, and experienced.

At my Paris exhibition last year, which had fifty-five paintings on display in a multi-room gallery, one of the things I came to enjoy was going around with some visitors and hearing what they had to say.  I sometimes asked which paintings they liked best and why, or what they saw in this painting or that one.  They frequently saw things I didn’t.  Children were the best.  I cannot look at some of my paintings without seeing what a ten-year-old girl or a seven-year-old boy told me what a painting is about or what they see in it.

I like that. It is one of the reasons I don’t put titles on my paintings.  When someone sees or acquires one, it is no longer mine. Their subjective response to it is what matters.  How it speaks to them, their mind, and emotions. What they see in it is theirs, so they should call the painting whatever they like.  Again, it is Duchamp who expressed it well: “Ce sont les regardeurs qui font les tableaux.”  That influential line in modern aesthetics translates as “It is the viewers who make the paintings.”  So, it’s not me who completes my work or controls its “meaning.” Lesson learned.

I have come to enjoy having an audience and the, at times, quirky responses people have to my work.  Last year, a woman came to the Paris exhibition set on buying a painting, but couldn’t make up her mind because she had seen one on my website that wasn’t in the exhibition and couldn’t get it out of her mind. Today it hangs on her wall … completed.

So now, I am “unveiling” another thirty paintings online for a month, one per day. They were all done in New York over the years, including 2026, but they are works of memory stimulated by experiences around the world.