Art Thief

I am not one of those artists who says, “I’ve always been an artist. I was always drawing and painting as a child.” My favorite activity as a child was playing school, where my sister and I would exchange roles as teacher or student. If I was always anything, I was always studious.

And that is why, I’m sure, I felt some need to write this little essay to accompany my show “Art Thief” at the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts in June 2026. Rational understanding, clear verbal communication, historical connections—these are as important to me as making art.

My academic career is entirely in the study of philosophy. I have a BA, MA, and PhD in philosophy and taught philosophy in Massachusetts for almost two decades. I’m getting very old; I will be 81 when my show opens, and I decided it might be time to bring my philosophy to my art, or at least to this stage of my art.

Most people think of philosophy as being comparatively thoughtful, like “having a philosophy of life,” but this is pretty far from what the academic pursuit of philosophy is. The academic study of philosophy is rigorous argument and justification of belief. It is love of truth and love of big, important questions and love of human’s rational capacity and drive to think about those questions deeply.

I bring this up not to be self-congratulatory. No one needs to be interested in what I have to say here except for myself. But, for me, planting my feet in philosophy explains a lot about when and how I planted my feet in art.

In the 1990s I learned to paint floorcloths, canvas rugs, which ever since have adorned my home. Floorcloths are a craft: useful, full of process, measurement, and design. I like the process, but what I especially like is the fact that no one in the world has rugs like my rugs. They are unique to me, and this idea of working to produce some real, visual thing in the world that expresses your own creative intent took hold.

In 2012, by chance, I took a workshop in monoprinting given by Cayen Robertson at the Mendocino Art Center. I instantly fell in love with all things ink: the smell, the texture, the brayer, the infinite possibilities. I was pretty good at it, too, getting my first piece into a prestigious show at O’Hanlon—“Women Artists Making Their Mark”—just three months after taking that first workshop. I took workshops with Cayen at O’Hanlon for five or six more years.

Print making has a long, storied, rich place in the history of art. But here is the simple truth: all printing is the transfer of ink from one surface (the plate) onto another (the art surface). The ink may be spread on a wood block, a piece of linoleum, a piece of plastic, or an etched metal plate. It may be transferred onto paper, or wood, or silk, or canvas. The essence is the same: printing is the transfer of ink from one surface onto another.

Photo transfers are the transfer of ink from printed material such as photographs, magazines, scans, or computer printouts onto an art surface. Robert Rauschenberg is usually associated with making significant advances in print innovation in modern times. He was very experimental in his use of photo transfers, trying various solvents to transfer the ink from, for instance, magazine pages and pictures onto various surfaces. In a recent article in the New York Times celebrating what would have been his 100th birthday, the author writes, Rauschenberg “remains a celebrated figure in the 21st century because he gave license to succeeding generations of young artists to think about art in a new way, not as an expression of draftsmanly skill or inner torment, but rather as a playful process.”

I think my favorite contemporary artist who combines photo transfers with painting and drawing is the Nigerian American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Her complicated works transfer images of Nigerian life and family onto huge, multi-layered, and stunning art works.

So, photo transfers, which are the throughline of the art in this show of mine, are participants in the long history of print making and art making. My photo transfers are made using a scanner, a computer, and a laser printer. Artists have always used the tools of their time to capture or transform their perceptions, their memories, their feelings. And, so, I use the computer and laser printer. I am an art thief. I make scans of photographs or drawings or other artist’s images, transform them in Photoshop to create illusions or references that are essential or revealing to me, print them out on an ordinary laser printer, then, in a fairly complicated process, transfer them onto a surface to become a part (sometimes trivial, sometimes major) of my art work.

In this context, the computer is a tool that improves my sight, improves my imagination, and allows me to reassemble and recontextualize accidents of my experience. It makes me very happy that, having moved on from monoprinting to painting, I can still keep printing in my painting. Still keep ink in my toolbox, still keep one love while dreaming about another.

Having laid all this groundwork, let me think, now, about how I understand my art. I don’t believe it’s necessary or important in general for artists to understand their art; lots of artists hate talking about their art or their process; they just want to do it. But given my background in philosophy, I can’t help it: I want to understand what I am doing and why.

LIKE TOM STOPPARD

Tom Stoppard died recently and my husband and I are great fans. After his death, it hit me quite suddenly and powerfully that in my art making, I am like Tom Stoppard. Please don’t get me wrong. I absolutely don’t mean by that that I am great at what I do; I don’t pretend to be prolific or a genius or terribly accomplished.

But here is what I do mean: there are three things about Tom Stoppard’s plays that I think are like things about my art.

1. STOPPARD PLAYS ARE MEANING-ADJACENT

Stoppard’s plays aren’t themselves profound, but they rely on truly profound offstage others: Shakespeare, Newton, Byron, Wilde, Sappho, Marx, Kant, Plato. Stoppard loves ideas and constantly alludes to and references giants in our cultural lexicon.

His characters discuss important topics like ethics, love, time, romance, science, certainty and doubt—they discuss the ideas of others and reflect those ideas in their lives.

I think of his plays as meaning-adjacent.

I like to think of my paintings as meaning-adjacent. (They are not profound. I have said that the only time I am profound-adjacent is when I lie in bed next to my husband.)

They often allude to and reference truly profound artists: Morandi, Irwin, Rembrandt, Diebenkorn, Van Gogh, Thiebaud, Degas. Artists who dealt with huge problems in art like the nature of light, the subjectivity of experience, the architecture of space, the role of intention, the flatness of two-dimensional space. These are huge questions dealt with imaginatively and conscientiously by great artists. And I admire their efforts.

Very often discussions about art circle around discussions of perception, memory, and feeling. Perceptions get replicated or interpreted; memories soften and loosen perceptions; personal feelings get expressed. For me, though all of these are important, I think it is my background in philosophy that leads me to ideas as the source of my art. Ideas that come from beautiful poems, ideas that come from feminist rage, ideas that come from mythology, ideas that come from art that takes my breath away.

I want my art not to be beautiful or personal particularly, but to be imaginative, thoughtful, and engaging. I think this is what moved me from abstract art to more figurative art. Robert Irwin, the great light/space artist, said “Figurative thinking and the processes of logical thought are really parallel.” Logical thought is very much what philosophy is, so, in some sense my art becoming more personal is my art becoming more figurative.

2. STOPPARD PLAYS ARE WITTY AND CLEVER

Stoppard’s plays are always clever. They are playful, they have an elegant wit, a charm and delight.

It always pleases me when someone walks into my studio or sees a painting in a show and there is a nice smile on their face. A smile of recognition, a smile of curiosity, an indication that they got my small joke, my small stab at meaning.

Imagination is older than reason. Imagination has greater connective tissue than reason. Robert Motherwell said a painting is “a visual trace of the human spirit.” And inventing an image that wakes you up a little or gets you to pay attention to what you just felt is a simple pleasure.

3. STOPPARD STEALS FREELY

Stoppard’s plays not only reference profound thinkers they steal whole swaths of their brilliance.

I steal freely in my art. I steal my husband’s photos, I steal bits and pieces off the internet, I steal motifs and actual images from other artists. I used to be a little self-conscious about this, but I have learned not to be. Photo transfers are participants in the appropriative tradition of art, and they are no more suspect as original art than collage or cross-cultural appropriation.

It is my way of finding raw material I can rework, rethink, reassemble, remake to suit my own creative purposes.

The book “What Do I Know of Joy,” by Cayen Robertson and Linda Martinez Robertson, opens with a quote from the poet Edward Hirsch, “Works of art initiate and provoke other works of art: the process is a source of art itself.” In a similar vein, Wayne Thiebaud writes, “I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else.” The Legion of Honor of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francsico recently had a Thiebaud retrospective entitled “Art Comes From Art.” That show liberated me. Thiebaud owned being an art thief, reinterpreting works by old masters and sometimes quite literally copying works he admired with few changes.

It is a way of connecting to past artists and to other people generally. It is a way to learn but also to appreciate. To be inspired but also to invent. To respect but also to revise.

So, saying I am Like Tom Stoppard is a compact way for me to understand my art and to allow myself to observe myself as an artist, at least at this moment of my art practice. What follows is a catalog of the pieces in my show “Art Thief” (in no particular order). I hope my commentary above holds true and helpful.