New York City Years: the 1960s

Broadly brushed paintings of women riding the New York City subway grow from the collages of the early 1960s. Inspired by W.H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”, in which daily life continues as major events occur, the Birth of Venus blossoms. She rises from her shell in Birth of Venus with the Yellow Submarine, poses with her half-shell on highways next to a dump truck, a VW Beetle, a Karmann Ghia or a John Deere tractor. By the end of the 1960s she is found in complex landscapes reminiscent of Brueghel, where New York City buildings and bridges rise in the background, and upstate New York farms dominate the foreground, where Venus rises from a pond, or the Battenkill.