My work is about light: about the conflicts of light and shadow and about the emotional responses light provokes. In series focused on exceptional outspoken women, portraits, skies, water lilies, landscapes, and still lifes I probe life’s fragility, struggle, contradictions, and inscrutability. These areas of figurative realism offer rich possibilities to celebrate moments of beauty and wonder found in individuals and the world, but also to grapple with the world’s, natural environment’s and individual’s inherent fragility and challenges. A bittersweet sadness tussles with the pleasure natural beauty engenders. These artworks, so dependent on the light of the transient moment depicted call up temporality and all it implies in nature, in our lives and in the lives of those around us. Pain of tragedy reverberates throughout life, often as beauty, joy and fulfillment enlivens it. These images call on us to acknowledge the layered complexity of every moment we live in, or confront.