2009

To honor my mother’s 90th birthday, I painted her at age 9 holding a kitten and me at age 4 with a cat. Isolating the figures from black-and-white photos from 1928 and 1949 and then painting them together gave me insights into our shared traits as well as our differing outlooks. The process deepened my understanding of the ways in which our dissimilar childhoods and times played into the changing roles of our relationship over nearly seven decades. In appreciation for being named after the 1928 song “Jeannine I Dream of Lilac Time,” I painted us under the gigantic lilac bush that dominated our front yard and served as a backdrop for many family photos.