For more than fifty years, I worked in private because I needed to learn what my art was before allowing it to be defined from outside. I did not find one style that could contain every period of my life, nor one method that remained sufficient. The work changed because the life changed. Each experience altered what I needed art to do.

The many surfaces I used belong to this history as much as any sequence of styles. Earth allowed an image to vanish and begin again; charcoal joined drawing to language; discarded metal, film, leather, and cardboard received the work when conventional materials were unavailable or unnecessary. Fluid color later carried what deliberate thought could not move. The material was never merely a support—each one offered a different way for experience to become visible.

The bazaar educated my attention. Nature joined freedom to consequence and showed life and death within the same movement. The basement taught me to enter an uncertain space and wait for a form to emerge. Doman taught me to trust possibility before proof and to understand creativity as a disciplined response to reality. Zoya recognized the truth that appeared when I painted freely; losing her forced that freedom to enter a depth I had never imagined.

This is why I cannot separate my art from my life or tell its story through exhibitions alone. Painting became neither an escape from suffering nor a decoration placed over it. It gave experience a material life: something that could be seen, approached, altered, and held. It taught me that continuation need not falsify grief, and that form can sometimes reveal what thought is not yet able to know.

When I return to the beginning, I see the old bazaar. The passage beneath the dome is dark, and a narrow column of light descends through an opening above. Dust lifted by passing feet enters the beam. For a moment, every particle becomes visible—turning, rising, and falling through the illuminated air. A seven-year-old girl stands still and watches.