Member Profile

As I approach 70, I am choosing to write a bit more about my background as a reflection of my artistic and philosophical roots. I am filled with gratitude for those teachers who have come my way to show me the path toward what has been a very satisfying and rich life of exploring ideas and expressing my responses to those meandering concepts through painting, drawing, photography and of recent years, poetry and fiction. 

As the only child of two wonderful and supportive parents, I had the benefits of a middle-class upbringing in a community close to New York City. My childhood sensory associations are the smell of salt water, the squirmy feel of eels in Long Island Sound where I learned to swim, and the taste of popovers at a restaurant in Manhasset. My dad, Bob, commuted to Brooklyn where he worked as a designer of steel shelving for libraries and hospitals. He did not have the opportunity to practice as an architect after graduation with a master's degree from Columbia in 1939 as the war ramped up. My mom was a homemaker who grew up on a small ranch in Oklahoma. Flo was true grit. 

Bob and Flo (bob and flow, as I have said at ZLMC on more than one occasion) had unique sensibilities: my dad's art-deco inspired simplicity and my mom's innate abilities to arrange flowers for our dining table, cane chairs, braid rugs from colorful wool strands, sew all my clothes to my specifications, and present healthy foods that she cooked from scratch. Steak on Saturdays, apple pie ala mode with a sliver of cheddar cheese on autumn Sundays.

My interest in art was clear to my parents from the start and my mom drove me on a fairly regular basis into Manhattan to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the new MOMA and other cultural venues including the holiday spectacles at Radio City Music Hall. I was an overweight child who was not destined to become a Rockette, so I delved further into art, specifically painting and drawing. My fantasies of exotic locales fueled the emotive content.

My step-grandmother, Marie, married my grandfather, Harley Leroy Sensemann in the early 20s. He was a professor of English at the University of Michigan, Amherst, and Columbia and had a strong desire to travel. He took teaching posts in Egypt, Turkey and Greece and they made their way through the middle east in a pop-up camper that he built from a kit and shipped to Egypt. After his death, she lived in an apartment in Manhattan that contained many objects from their travels that are now in my home: brass and copper tables, a hookah, a cloisonné lamp from China, and alabaster vases from Italy. I have very clear memories of touching, holding and fantasizing about each object, because I had no siblings to distract me from my mental adventures. My grandmother talked with me about opera, art, philosophy and religion with the active curiosity of a good atheist and self-taught intellectual. 

We moved to New Jersey when I was ten, and I was taken under the wing of a marvelous art teacher who took me to nine art galleries in Manhattan to see concurrent Picasso exhibitions.  I was hooked on cubism as well as the moody works from his blue years in Paris - I was going to be a painter and travel. It seemed to me putting my ideas into visual form was a way to combine my parents' aesthetics and my grandparents' wanderlust and intellectual drive. Two high school art teachers inspired the rest of my art story: one taught courses in Tibetan Buddhism at the New School on Saturdays and taught me new ways to think, and the other saw my potential as a painter. I was slightly conflicted: majorette or beatnik, straight-A student or artist, pep rally enthusiast or painter of tortured souls and tattered old Jersey shore houses.  I thought I could do it all.

Fast track: degree in printmaking from Syracuse; Tyler  School of Art  Rome where I fell in love with a young man and with Italy; grad school in painting at Tyler, Temple University Philadelphia; a marriage to a young Unitarian seminarian; a teaching job in at the U of I in Champaign at age 23 as "the woman;" tenure at 30; a move to Chicago with my second husband in 1979; a child, a late term miscarriage and a high-risk pregnancy; two kids; more art, exhibitions and lectures in many countries; and a raging twenty-year case of debilitating ulcerative colitis. 

But, art prevailed. In 40 years of daily art practice I have explored thirty-three distinctively different bodies of paintings and drawings - various exoticisms, romanticisms, feminism, as well as gothic melodrama and baroque sensibilities. Italy and Japan have figured prominently in my research. Japan. Buddhism. Zen and questions about Japanese culture, architecture, 19th century ukiyo-e prints, ikebana, kabuki and ritual. My overriding question has been how to combine my tendency to complicate visual fields within the simplicity of Zen. My series of some thirty drawings and twenty paintings titled "Indra's Net" are a visualization of the Buddhist meditation on interconnectedness - woven complexity as both the Relative and the Absolute.

My practice and the Dharma inform every aspect of my art now.  I will exhibit a new series of small paintings on paper at ZLMC in December: simple rocks floating in space that I have painted with as much patience, discipline and focused energy as three of the Six Paramitas can inspire. Life is a rich exploration of possibility.