Empire bluff (2010): 
How to depict the intricate foreground on top of the Empire bluff at Lake Michigan with its multitude of greenery – wildflowers, grasses, grape leaves – still in the early morning shadow? Looking at Cézanne’s early morning shadowed foregrounds inspired me to abstract the complexity of the foliage covering the sandy dune.
Divide( 2018): 
An Empire bluff view from below the top. The distant Lake Michigan and South Bar Lake, divided by the Empire village beach, are viewed across a foreground of trees illuminated by the early morning sun. Again, at first I failed attempting to paint the complexity in the foreground, the sun-lit leaves. This time, I found inspiration in the paintings of Emily Carr, the great Canadian painter of the first half of the 20th century.
Footsteps in the Sand(2018): This painting was done rapidly within one month after arriving in Michigan from New York City because of the early June deadline of the Grand Rapids artprize.com. No time to spare asking for advice from the living or the dead. I soldiered on by myself to paint ‘Footsteps in the Sand’ and it was fun!
Why was painting the foreground of the ‘Footsteps’ easier for me? Maybe it has to do with my childhood visual experience. Nearly every day, I left the gray concrete of my apartment building to walk my dog on a dyke that protects my German hometown Wilhelmshaven (below sea level at high tide) from the North Sea. One could walk on a gravel path on top of the dyke or below its grassy slope on a brick path framed by granite boulders descending to the ocean water. The low tide exposed the mudflat ranging from Denmark to the Netherlands.
While in the granite boulders in the foreground were visually stimulating, most of my viewing extended into the distance, across a large bay of the North Sea, the Jadebusen. Thus, I grew up viewing vast distances rather than lovely flowers in front of me.
What comes to my mind is a decade-old experiment with kittens that, raised in an environment of vertical bars, were oblivious to a horizontal bar and ran up against it rather leaping across it. In contrast, walking my dog at the North Sea attuned me to horizontal rather than vertical lines present in mountains and city-scapes.
The sparse, sandy foreground of ‘Footsteps in the Sand’ was well within my visual comprehension.
, an excerpt shown here, the top left of the tall vessel only shows a faint delineation from the background, barely noticeable in this small photo. Note that the colors are becoming more mute. 
the year Morandi died, the left top of the tall vessel fully merges with the background. At an exhibition of this still life at the MET, a note next to it showed a comment Morandi made before his death which went something like this ‘I still have so many of my ideas to realize‘.
His painting, now called the ‘Tänzerin’ (Dancer), is reputed to have been begun as a commission in 1916 to memorialize a daughter who had committed suicide. But the parents rejected their commmissioned painting. Shortly before his death in 1918, Klimt altered the painting to show a young woman with bare breasts. Note that the flowers of the girl’s skirt are merging with the flowers of the background. This painting can be seen in the Neue Gallery, NYC.
In his 1935 painting Mother and Eva, the mother’s deeply wrinkled face resembles the bark of the tree. The face merges with the tree. Mother, during the death of the vibrant civilization in Germany, looks into the distance, rather than relating to the child, the rosy-faced Eva, not shown in this excerpt.
was a German avant-garde painter who founded an association of women artists in 1926. The Nazis designated her work as “Degenerate Art” and purged it from museum collections. Subjected to hostility, she committed suicide. A groundskeeper at the Kunsthalle Hamburg preserved many of her paintings by hiding them in his apartment.
(1890 – 1976) was associated with movements of New Objectivity and Symbolism. One of her important works is a series of lithographs illustrating a collection of lesbian love poems by Pierre Louÿs. Until the Nazis denounced her motifs as Jewish, she supported herself as a commercial artist doing illustrations and caricatures for journals. She survived the Hitler regime by practicing “inner emigration”.
intings of psychiatric patients, as shown here. But many of these paintings were confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis. In addition to pitiless self-portraits, she also painted scenes from the Hamburg harbor with its workers and prostitutes. After undergoing a forced surgical sterilization in 1935, she stopped painting and was murdered in 1940 under the Nazi “euthanasia” program.
(1877- 1962), an avant-garde painter, co-founded the Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider). Kandinski, another co-founder of this art movement, adopted her use of saturated colors and abstract expressionist style. During the Nazi era, she hid all of her own artwork and that of other members of the Blaue Reiter in her home, where, in spite of several searches, it was never found. In 1957, she donated all of this art work to the City of München, Germany.
(1860 – 1938), another co-founder of the Blaue Reiter escaped persecution having emigrated to Switzerland where she painted, in addition to self-portraits, many colorful, landscapes in an expressionist style.
hyperreal with its imperfections, while Pearlstein’s skin looks hard like porcelain. Did the MET juxtapose these paintings on purpose or did it happen serendipitously?