Miriam Jacobs

In most of these pastel pieces, I was transferring the intensity of my distressed thoughts and feelings onto paper, as a kind of cathartic release, thus the frenetic, quick marks.  In the paintings, I was usually in quieter, more contemplative moods, and able to paint with more subdued deliberation.  The leaves were more observational than emotional, though I remember being excited just to sit down and draw.  The work in the second row, second in from the left, was done in a workshop I took at the Newark Museum where we were taught how to use hand-cut stencils, and while I used them in an out-of-the-box way according to the teacher, I was pleased with the result.