My little Ladies...

I am always overwhelmed by the level of affection that "the girls" generate at my exhibits. People bring friends and family to visit them, as if they are real people. The people who collect them literally treat them like family members. Their collectors always refer to them as "the girls." One collector told me that she says "good morning" to her girl everyday. Another had a garden wall painted in her room to provide her sculpture with a pleasant environment. I am always thrilled to see how deeply people feel about them because they come from the purest part of me as an artist. They contain everything I was as a girl and everything I am as a woman; my strength, my fragility, my stubborness, my independance...it’s all there in that little expression. Since most of these sculptures are commissioned works, I am usually quite aware of the love that is awaiting them in the world, even while I am creating them.  These sculptures  always make me feel more like a surrogate-mother than an artist.  And, of course, they take on lives of their own, once they are created.  When they are delivered to their new families and placed on their waiting pedestals, they take on even more of that dismissive little expression.  As if to say to me, "I am at home now, you may leave."

The pie-shaped faces are taken from my granddaughters who – as my mother puts it – have eyelashes long enough to sweep down the stars.