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During this year's reunion, my husband, Henry, and I will be in Nepal visiting our son Leon, 24, who is finishing up his final year at U. of Wisconsin on a program in Nepal culminating in field work in the Kanchenjunga area. Our daughter, Naomi, 28, leaves on March 21 with her boyfriend, Joe Young, to spend six months hiking the Appalachian trail starting in Georgia.
Right after the last reunion I attended, in l987, I found I had breast cancer. That was a momentous time of change and facing my mortality. I had surgery (a segmental resection, often called lumpectomy) and radiation and have not had any recurrence since, for which I give thanks.
In l989 I began teaching full time in the Art Department of City College of San Francisco after being there part time for l7 years. I teach painting, drawing and design. It is a huge community college with wonderful students from a great variety of countries, backgrounds and ages. The challenge for me has been to balance home and family life with teaching and departmental commitments and at the same time to keep my art life alive and developing.
I have been continuing to do paintings which come out of the inner world of dreams, visions, and my personal spiritual and psychological journey. Henry, who is also a painter, and I share a studio in the lower part of our house, in what used to be a storefront space. He and I have had the opportunity in recent years to travel twice to Malta to participate in art shows there and visit the neolithic temples which date from about 2800 B.C. My early love of archeology and the ancient world has been revived by these experiences. This has influenced my art and is also connected with the archetypal feminine and goddess imagery which had begun to emerge in my work many years ago.
I feel very blessed in having Henry, Naomi and Leon and in having had the opportunity to express my experiences through making art, writing and teaching. I look forward to further travel--I really love drawing and doing watercolors while seeing new places. For the last 3 years (I started while on sabbatical) I have been keeping a visual journal, doing an image every day--first in a grid format and now in the form of vertical scrolls.
