Life happened.  Even though I dearly love autumn leaves, in the mid nineteen nineties I became allergic to them.  I didn’t just get stuffed up; I got dangerously dizzy and nauseated.  So I stayed away and it was a loss to me of several months in the year for 10 years duration.

I was invited by the University of Wisconsin Arboretum to exhibit a one person show in the Steinhauer Trust Gallery in 2003. Here was a golden opportunity to take myself on an autumn walk that would not make me sick.  Twenty four artworks reminded me of the many years of living next to the Arb – the bike rides, the tour groups, walks with friends, the colors.  I could even remember the fragrances and the windy days and the colors.  I remembered what a relief it was to walk freely in autumn without insect repellent, and the colors.  I thought about autumn and how I was in the autumn of my life

“My Inner Child Resists this Fact of Life:

and how easy it had been to say good-bye to summer when it’s autumn.

“Legacy of a Tree”

I was also missing painting large, so I decided to paint this show large.  I discarded old, ugly looking canvases from stretchers and stretched soaking wet sheets of watercolor paper that had been cut off of large rolls.  I emptied the studio of furniture and laid the “canvases” out across the floor with narrow pathways between.

Some of the paintings were exhibited still on their stretchers.  Some, I sanded off the stretchers and framed.  Some never seemed to gel.  I tore those in small pieces and recycled them in a free-form piece called  “Letting Go/Relaxing Outward.”

The show, for me, was an experiment in presentation as it evolves from content.

I know very little about botany and was exhibiting in a location where most of the passers-by were botany experts but probably not as familiar with experimental art.  I was recreationally familiar with every section of the Arboretum and loved and valued it.  Often on walks, I would happen upon indications that an experiment was on-going.  I or my companions would murmer to each other so as not to interfere with the experiment, “Some experiment or other!”  This is the title of one of the pieces.  I imagined what the botany experts would say as they carefully made their way down the corridor of art that was my show.  I imagined that they would murmer to themselves a correct assessment of my show, “Some experiment or other!”