Introduction

"Here [Sicily] the past is so much stronger than the present, [that] one seems remote like the immortals, looking back at the world from their otherworld."

D. H. Lawrence

Painting in Sicily has been a journey through the Mediterranean, across Ancient Mythology and the fierce play of nature that has forged her — a fuming Mount Aetna, unrelenting winds, all absorbed, finally, in Sicily’s eternal and remote culture.

I found myself abandoning reality for iconography, informed from within by layers of history, memory, and emotion, seeking to convey the primal, neural connection between movement and feeling.  

Ophrah Shemesh

There is stillness at the center of the paintings and around that stillness, turmoil or turbulence — a chaos in which the subject is trying to hold on to the doll as the lovers run, hold to the center or they will be whisked away by an unseen force.

We are left to feel fear or suspicion.   Who, what are these beings, these unembodied bodies?    Humans who seem not to be on earth when we find them, but in or from some other realm; we are suspended with them in realms in-between…  We are taken to where the unsayable is lived.  

Anne Randolph Howze

They’re beautiful but alarming at once…  

You certainly know how to wrap your viewers in the complex sensuality of all your figures.

David Freedberg