Sylvia Fein: Surreal Nature

sylvia fein surreal nature

sylvia fein surreal nature

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition sylvia fein : surreal nature

jointly organized by Krowswork Gallery and Wilson Art Service, January 18–February 22, 2014.

Exhibition coordination by Travis Wilson and Jasmine Moorhead Publication designed and produced by Jasmine Moorhead Artwork photography by Nicholas Pishvanov Accompanying documentary by Robert Beier Special thanks to Barbara and Dave Bhachu Printed by Edition One, Berkeley Published by krowsworkbooks All artwork © 2014 Sylvia Fein Essay © 2014 Robert Cozzolino Introduction © 2014 Dan Millman

W.A.S wilsonartservicellc.com

krowswork 480 23rd Street Oakland, California 94612 krowswork.com

Introduction Dan Millman

Sylvia Fein. View of the Valley. 1956. Egg tempera on board, 12 x 24 inches.

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very creative art serves as a metaphor for the art of living. As a Zen tea master observed, “How we do anything is how we do everything.”

upon an elephant—one touching the tail, another the ear or leg or trunk—each with a different experience of the creature’s essence.

Sylvia Fein’s life and body of work reflect her approach to living artfully. Considering the idea that beauty reflects unity in variety, we see in this artist’s work the unification of opposites: discipline and spontaneity, thinking and feeling, flesh and spirit.

This is what fine art, like that of Sylvia Fein, contributes to our lives: it reveals to us our own mind and heart, our own meaning and aspirations. It speaks a higher language understood by all, and befriends children and adults, the lonely and the convivial—especially the lonely, who seek connection through art.

It is always tempting to over-analyze the fruits of a creative life and to project upon that work all sorts of meanings that the artist may not have intended.

Because the work becomes meaningful to us— those who admire, from near or far, this productive output and longevity.

Sylvia’s work overflows with life and becomes imbued with spirit because the artist paints something of her spirit into the canvas, along with her egg tempera. There is no formula for what she does, no trail of stardust to follow. Each of us must blaze our own trails, just as Sylvia has done, reminding us that, in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, “It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

At its heart, every work of art is an oracle in which we find our own wisdom and meaning and beauty.

Like the parable of the five blind men who came

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Inner Cosmos Robert Cozzolino

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ylvia Fein’s The Lady and the White Knight (1942–43) is a double portrait of the artist and her husband William Scheuber (1918–2013) that she made from memory while he was away in the Pacific during the Second World War. Fein and Scheuber had been married in May 1942 and like so many other young couples affected by the global conflict, were separated and faced an unknown future in 1943. Fein’s close friends, the artist John Wilde (1919–2006) and his wife Helen Ashman (1919–1966) found themselves in a similar predicament. Both Fein and Wilde made intensely personal work during the period in which they conflated the war’s absurdity and devastation with their own emotional suffering. Wilde turned to surrealism—literary and visual—in his treatment of the situation. Fein appropriated “ancient traditions, myths, and legends in a contemporary form of expression.”1

The years of the Second World War were an unrelentingly difficult time for Fein emotionally and physically, and her narrative paintings of the period reveal this with great intensity. Like many of her contemporaries, whether exploring abstract modes of expression or emulating Northern Renaissance art, Fein found ancient tales and archetypal symbols resonant with the apocalyptic world situation.

Binding her psychological state to well-worn legends helped counter the overwhelming sense of contingency caused by the war.2 Among the most resilient and totemic images of this period is that of the open eye which appears on a deep red heart fastened to Scheuber’s tunic. It is there to ward off evil, to assert wisdom and vision, but also as a stand-in for Fein, separated from Scheuber back in their native Wisconsin. As a

Sylvia Fein. The Lady and the White Knight. 1942–43. Egg tempera on board, 29 x 16 inches. Opposite page: Sylvia Fein, c. 1943

perpetually alert guardian and supernatural link to Fein, the emblem lies within an icon of love and life, connecting the artist’s ability to visualize her beloved to his well-being and sustaining faith in her devotion to him.

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the preliminary drawing, she wrote to Scheuber, describing the image in progress:

I DREW today on you and me—it is called THE XPULSION OR THE LADY WITH the red KNIGHT…I am done but having a hard time with you. I can’t make your legs go right. They are too long or short or stiff or loose…The lady (me) is little with an ocelot cape on one shoulder and a MARGAY (felis tigris) sitting between her feet. She is in white silk sort of short underwear and has big flowers in the hair and a decorative embroidered string in her hands (the flowers are surrounded by Catalpa leaves) and she is stepping on grotesque Max Ernst like stones. Just a few scattered here and there, and the ground is strewn with fallen pomegranates. See it really is like Adam and Eve but it’s more like Alice in W. so it makes me happy because it is really all about the war but the man (you)—god what does a man look like—all you have so far is a head and a pair of dog tags, and a big bird on your shoulder and you are wearing bracelet-like, on your arm—a bunch of carrots, a pair of bellows, a strong box, a helmet, fire tongs, and a garland of camellias and carnations stuck full of purple thistles.5

From left: John Wilde, Marshall Glasier, and Sylvia Fein, Madison, Wisconsin, c. 1942

As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Fein along with Wilde, had studied historical techniques and art history with James Watrous (1908–1999), an artist and educator who helped fuel a revival of Old Master techniques in the United States.3 She still paints by handmaking her egg tempera medium—a mixture of egg, distilled water, and powdered pigment. Through Fein’s studies and her friendships with older artists Karl Priebe (1914– 1976) and especially the charismatic Marshall Glasier (1902–1988), she had a good working knowledge of fourteenth-to-seventeenth–century European art and contemporary art. Her aim at the time was to “approach the empty painting board and transform my feelings (unspoken) and ability into some set of cohesive painting.”4 For Fein this meant channeling her anger, sorrow, and longing into narratives in which she takes on the roles of Eve, Persephone, Alice from Lewis Carroll’s tales, Lilith, and others. In drawings of the period, such as Lady Looking for Her Lover (1943–44; Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison), Fein rides a magic carpet and scans the terrain below for Scheuber, evident from visual allusions to Australia and the South Pacific.

It is clear from Fein’s letter that she willfully conflated her source material, transforming it according to her needs in making sense out of the meaning of her situation.

Somewhere along the process the bird on Scheuber’s shoulder became a kingfisher, a bird indigenous to Australia.

Lady with the White Knight was among the first of these paintings. Fein conceived of it as an expulsion scene rather than a serene image of Eden. This accounts for the psychological distance between the figures, the distant haunted look in Scheuber’s eyes and the remorseful cadence to Fein’s body language. While working on

William Scheuber and Sylvia Fein on their wedding day, 1942

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Early in Fein’s career—she was twenty-two when she started the painting—she had already revealed an eye for specific details, the integration of imagination and close observation, a reverence for nature as the constant in human experience, and a quest for significant meaning in the every day. As it had with Wilde, the war gave Fein an urgent existential subject but it also accelerated her ability and she strove to meet the gravity of the situation.

In her application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, submitted in the fall of 1943, Fein gives the impression already of an artist sure of her ambition and identity. She wrote, careful to remain an independent, “I reject classification as a surrealist or a magical realist or American romantic… though the equipment I use in my work will ever be founded on my ranging imagination, and will never acquiesce to ‘the fact’ alone…which concerns so much of American art production and [although it]…concerns me much now in the work whereby I earn my living (advertising)…I reject [it] in my own painting.” While denying naturalism in her work she also asserted that she had a “perpetual interest in legend” while being careful to stress that she uses and mixes aspects of stories.

She hoped that her work would be read subjectively and not fixed to one specific meaning.6 Critics responding to Fein’s early work often associated her with a fanciful thread of American surrealism, even when they also recognized the Persian and German Gothic influences in her technique. Her first solo exhibition in New York,

Perls Galleries brochure cover, 1946

at the Perls Galleries in 1946, received positive attention, but in looking for stylistic affinities, the underlying feminist implications of her wartime narratives went unnoticed.7 While it is easy to associate Fein’s work with female contemporaries such as Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), Leonora Carrington (1917–2011), or Remedios Varo (1908–1963) based on shared aspects of subject matter, technique, and even overlap in locales such as Mexico (where Fein worked from 1944–46), her interest in mythmaking, especially reconfiguring and reusing disparate aspects of myth and legend to make sense of the world, shows that she shared impulses more broadly with artists who pursued abstraction as they worked through similar ideas. Although Fein did not begin to explore the limits of representation until much later, the philosophical basis of her work overlapped with that of Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Sonia Sekula (1918–1963) or even Lee Mullican (1919–1998) as she reconceived of the world in the wake of war, privileged the supernatural in her imagery, and paid attention to the cosmos in skies, increasingly towards the end of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s, that crackle with organic energy.

Sylvia Fein, near Ajijic, Mexico, c. 1944

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Sylvia Fein. Birds Flying into the Face of the Storm. 1965. Egg tempera on board, 9 x 18 inches.

emy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia) or a sky that appears to bear the inferno of end times in Lady Writing a Love Letter in the Landscape (1954), in which Fein finds the transcendent in her environment. However, there was an unprecedented openness in the new compositions despite their scale, and an expansiveness that seemed to penetrate deep into illusory space. As she reflected, the change was liberating. “WOW something released in me—more spontaneity faster results…

Whole worlds…in tiny paintings.”9

After the war Fein and her husband settled in California, where she has lived and worked ever since. She earned her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951 and reconnected with the composer Harry Partch, who she had known of through Wisconsin friends; he would be a frequent correspondent and visitor in the 1950s. In 1955, following a series of large, colorful, and crisply designed paintings of ladies in peril, Fein began to paint on a much smaller scale than she had ever before. Her subjects, paradoxically, became the California landscape and the churning, explosive, untamed sea. Working often at a miniature scale, these paintings strive to reveal an exhilaratingly expansive universe compressed into a tiny space.

In each miniature cosmos we are treated to a world examined up close, brought near to our senses; yet their infinitesimal detail and disorienting revelations tend to disperse out of reach, leaving us with a sensation of vertigo.

This simultaneous forward projection and deep recession occurs in Birds Flying into the Face of the Storm (1965; above and page 28 ) is a dazzling, turbulent explosion of wind and water punctuated by a flurry of black and white birds flittering in and out of saturated storm clouds. Flecks and specks of paint multiply into thousands of tiny dots that evoke sizzling sounds, omnipresent mist beading up in the atmosphere, and a terrible splashing of summer rain. Fein’s vision transforms an observed instant into perpetual revelation. Nature’s elusive improvisational force is made tangible and we are allowed to examine its infinite variations.8 There are passages of her earlier work, as in the clusters of clouds that appear like fruit in Lilith (1943–44; Pennsylvania Acad-

Sylvia Fein. Lady Writing a Love Letter in the Landscape (detail).

1954. Egg tempera on board, 295/8 x 211/8 inches.

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By 1973, however, Fein had stopped painting.

She pursued other creative projects, including two landmark studies of visual thinking.10 She was surprised when in 2002 she contemplated a return to painting. “NOT POSSIBLE,” she wrote, “I am preparing a 4 x 8 board à la Wilde gesso and glue. What is going on?”11 By 2003 she had started to paint again and by 2004 could report, “I paint at least twice a week and think I am finding somebody at home but no one I recognize yet.”12 Fein’s current work, a virtuoso outgrowth of that re-acquaintance with her craft feels like a pleasurable convergence of all she has learned in a life made of innumerable chapters and reinventions.

One critical to her identity and connected to her recent work is that of a farmer and master gardener. Close to the land and in tune to the seasons throughout her life, Fein planted an olive orchard on her land in the 1990s (among other offerings).

At one point her harvest came up to a ton of fruit.13 Among her first paintings was a self-portrait as an olive tree (2004; see page 68).

Sylvia Fein. Eye Sees the End of the World. 2010. Egg tempera on board, 24 x 24 inches.

Fein’s work of 2010 migrated away from the eye embedded or anchored in flesh towards the eye unbound by earth or matter. In works such as Eyes in the Sky, Exploding Eye Star, Eye Sees the End of the World, and Red Rising Eye (see pages 36–55) Fein presents disembodied eyes at one with spirit, ethereal, transcending optical vision to access a kind of seeing that prophesizes, penetrates time, and occupies parallel dimensions. At times these compositions seem cosmic, related to the mystery and color of nebulae, the outermost planets of our solar system, and environments we have only recently been able to document. Alternately they seem to hover at the genetic core, interpenetrating humanity, gazing inward at the microcosm. Accordingly, Fein’s approach to paint has changed again, emphasizing tangibility of its matter and viscosity yet applied with such transparency and luminosity that its substance seems entirely of the intangible nature of her subject matter. These are as close to abstraction as Fein has ever pushed, and they feel simultaneously effortless and the most complex surfaces she has ever achieved.

When Fein began to paint again, a motif that emerged immediately was the eye. Dozens of eyes emerged from her studio, each one small, horizontal in format, and depicted to contain an aspect of Fein’s life (2006–08). The artist’s hands are implicit in the eye paintings although depicted only once, separately, in an intimate devotional panel (2006; see page 68). For an artist, eye and hands complement and complete one another, collaborate in making vision manifest, critically observing, receiving, translating, shaping, and destroying, remaking, reconstituting, reimagining. Dexterity and precision rely on acuity

Early in 2013, Fein’s life-long companion, Scheuber died. As she cared for Bill and watched over him in his last years, the eyes seem to reflect a searching for sense in the order of things, outward, beyond what is tangible here and now, seeking resolve in other worlds. Fein’s most recent work, directly affected by Bill’s mortality and reflecting her feeling of having grown with, from, back into, and unwillingly apart from him, is a series of trees (see pages 61–66).

Explicitly self portraits and double portraits, in

Sylvia Fein. Black Eye. 2008. Egg tempera on board, 5 x 7 inches.

and perception. As if to work through and emphasize the complex experiences that contribute to identity, whether places, memories, projections of the future, and engagement with the present, the eyes form a remarkable ongoing self-portrait that has expanded beyond focused images of eyes outward towards hallucination and revelation.

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Sylvia Fein. Together For Ever. (detail). 2013. Egg tempera on board, 30 x 40 inches. Below: Sylvia Fein at home, 2013.

union and individually, they reprise, return to, and re-imagine The Lady and the White Knight.

The garden is no longer that of the expulsion, but a place where the living bond and feed one another perpetually. These are images, ultimately, of hope and reunion, of resilience and fertility.

Fein’s extraordinary career reveals that lives grow in unexpected ways, are redirected, reborn, and capable of regeneration.

Robert Cozzolino is Senior Curator and Curator of Modern Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He met Sylvia Fein in 2001 and was the curator of With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940–1965, at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, in 2005.

1. Fein to Roland McKinney, June 11, 1946. Sylvia Fein Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Hereafter: Fein Papers.

2. For a discussion of this period in Fein’s life see Robert Cozzolino, With Friends: Six Magic Realists 1940–1965 (Madison: Elvehjem Museum of Art, 2005). For a focused discussion of how it affected Wilde, also see Robert Cozzolino, “Myself During the War: John Wilde’s World War II Sketchbook,” Elvehjem Museum of Art Bulletin, (1999–2001), 41–54.

3. See Richard J. Boyle, Hilton Brown, and Richard Newman, Milk and Eggs: The American Revival of Tempera Painting, 1930–1950 (Chadds Ford, Pa.: Brandywine River Museum; and Washington University Press, Seattle, 2002); James S. Watrous, “Technique Courses as Art History,” College Art Journal 2 (Nov. 1942): 7–11. For a specialized article on a recipe that Watrous had his students use, see James S. Watrous, “Observations on a Late Mediaeval Painting Medium,” Speculum 22 (July 1947): 430–34.

4. Sylvia Fein, interview by the author, March–May, 2002.

5. Sylvia Fein to William Scheuber, October 26, 1942. Fein Papers.

6. Fein, Guggenheim Fellowship application, Sept. 1943. Fein Papers.

7. Robert M. Coates, “In the Galleries,” The New Yorker (Sept. 21, 1946). For a recent re-reading of Fein’s work that restores its cultural, art-world, and feminist dimensions see Tere Arcq, Ilene Susan Fort, et al., In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2012).

8. For national reviews of this work see for instance, L. L., “Sylvia Fein,” Art News 57, no. 8 (December 1958), 59; M. S., “Sylvia Fein,” Arts 33, no. 4 (Jan. 1959), 63; J. H. B., “Sylvia Fein,” Art News 59, no. 10 (Feb. 1961), 52; and S. T., “Sylvia Fein,” Arts 35, no. 5 (Feb. 1961), 55.

9. Sylvia Fein, correspondence with author, February 14, 2003.

10. Sylvia Fein, Heidi’s Horse (Pleasant Hill, CA: Exelrod Press, 1976) and First Drawings: Genesis of Visual Thinking, with a foreword by Rudolf Arnheim (Pleasant Hill, CA: Exelrod Press, 1993).

11. Fein to author, August 4, 2002.

12. Fein to author, September 8, 2004.

13. Sylvia Fein to author, November 29, 2003.

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Early Works

the lady with the white knight 1942–43 Egg tempera on board 29 x 16 inches

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lady in landscape with animals 1942 Egg tempera on board 23 x 221/2 inches

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judith and proserpine 1942–43 Ink on paper 29 x 16 inches 16

saint lucy 1946 Pencil on paper 24 x 12 inches 17

study for the lady magician 1954 Pencil on paper 46 x 18 inches 18

woman being carried away by a horse 1954–55 Egg tempera on board 29 x 16 inches 19

young girl with poodle 1954 Egg tempera on board 39 x 171/2 inches 20

heidi

c. 1954–55 Egg tempera on board 9 x 9 inches 21

view of the valley 1956 Egg tempera on board 12 x 24 inches 22

Land & Sea

five mountains near red bluff 1956 Egg tempera on board 4 x 8 inches 24

reliez valley walnut orchard 1955 Egg tempera on board 8 x 14 inches 25

pleasant hill 1961 Egg tempera on board 41/2 x 85/8 inches

after the fire 1961 Egg tempera on board 51/2 x 111/2 inches 26

bay sun through raccoon straits 1958 Egg tempera on panel 4 x 8 inches

mermaid 1965 Egg tempera on panel 23/4 x 51/4 inches 27

birds flying into the face of the storm 1965 Egg tempera on panel 9 x 18 inches 28

shape of the sea 1964 Egg tempera on panel 91/4 x 18 inches 29

torso 1965 Egg tempera on panel 41/2 x 21/2 inches

west reach 1962 Egg tempera on panel 8 x 4 inches 30

trees and birds 2006 Egg tempera on board 12 x 6 inches 31

mountain landscape with grape vines 2007 Egg tempera on board 12 x 6 inches 32

the painting told me what to do 2012 Egg tempera on board 24 x 24 inches 33

martinez, california 2007 Egg tempera on board 12 x 24 inches 34

The Eyes

crucial eye 2011 Egg tempera on board 20 x 24 inches 36

landscape eye 2006 Egg tempera on board 5 x 7 inches

the sun eye 2006 Egg tempera on board 5 x 7 inches 37

black eye 2008 Egg tempera on board 5 x 7 inches

totem eye 2006 Egg tempera on board 5 x 7 inches 38

homage to renĂŠ magritte 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 24 inches 39

kite eye 2006 Egg tempera on board 51/2 x 7 inches 40

ojo blanco 2005 Egg tempera on board 6 x 8 inches 41

eye is watching 2010 Egg tempera on board 12 x 12 inches 42

twin eyes in the sky 2010 Egg tempera on board 30 x 24 inches 43

musical sky eyes 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 201/2 inches 44

eyes in the sky 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 30 inches 45

planetary eye 2010 Egg tempera on board 20 x 24 inches 46

spiral galactic eye 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 24 inches 47

green eyed star 2010 Egg tempera on board 12 x 16 inches 48

exploding eye star 2010 Egg tempera on board 12 x 16 inches 49

cri de l’eau 2011 Egg tempera on board 24 x 30 inches 50

eye sees the end of the world 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 24 inches 51

marble galaxy 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 24 inches 52

lavender eye in orbit 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 24 inches 53

cloudy eye 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 24 inches 54

red rising eye 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 24 inches 55

the eye shines down 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 24 inches 56

the beautiful eye 2010 Egg tempera on board 24 x 20 inches 57

do i see vegetables?

2011 Egg tempera on board 30 x 24 inches 58

genesis 2013 Egg tempera on board 30 x 24 inches 59

The Trees

for w.k.s.: i think i shall never see a tree as lovely as thee 2013 Egg tempera on board 36 x 24 inches 61

w.k.s. & s.f.

2013 Egg tempera on board 30 x 24 inches 62

s.f.s.

2013 Egg tempera on board 30 x 24 inches 63

together for ever 2013 Egg tempera on board 30 x 40 inches

bound together

2013 Egg tempera on board 40 x 30 inches 66

Afterword Jasmine Moorhead & Travis Wilson K

rowswork and Wilson Art Service are grateful for this unique opportunity to present the extraordinary work of friend and fellow traveler Sylvia Fein. This exhibition has provided us with a chance to delve into our collective backgrounds and walk a unified path of discovery. By applying our experience in curating, art making, research, and writing we look to reveal the light Sylvia has achieved in her life and art, helping to share the illuminated path her work has created. On both a personal and professional level, this exhibition represents a direction that it is imperative that we follow. Sylvia Fein’s work has provided a surprising, tangible touchstone toward a larger mission.

Sylvia Fein: Surreal Nature marks the beginning of a partnership between us in which we look to fill in the gaps of the conventional art historical timeline. We anticipate that the lines between modern and contemporary art will begin to blur and the distinction between artist and visionary will start to disappear. This is, of course, the case already with Sylvia’s work, which spans seventy years and multiple histories. As this happens, the potential for art to nourish us, collectively, also grows.

When talking about 20th-century American art there is a tendency to focus on the same thirty artists almost exclusively. Through this narrow lens there is no way we can expect to achieve a comprehensive overview of the past century’s artistic fabric or to better understand the winding path that has brought us to the current moment.

Where in this overly digested story does a visionary artist like Sylvia Fein exist? Sadly, it has been the longstanding policy of the mainstream to pretend that she doesn’t. And, yet, here she is in flesh and paint.

Add to this, the bizarre corollary of the art world’s propensity to assign importance only to a few years of an entire lifetime of work, subdividing and subjugating through a stilted, dialectical language—”good” years versus “bad”; “early” versus “late”; “important” and “of lesser importance.”

These are weak defenses that perhaps build markets but in the end also build walls between

art and its true purpose: to help us understand something bigger than ourselves and see ourselves as part of a complex but connected whole.

Again, the fact that Sylvia has been creating for more than seven decades and is doing some of her most powerful work right now defies this limited thinking and testifies to the importance of acknowledging the larger arc of an artist’s career.

Since she was a young artist, Sylvia Fein has understood these limitations of the art world and has pursued no part of it. She knew under these strictures her exuberant creative force would have withered. Additionally, she has experienced the barriers it has placed upon women, exasperatedly mocking the nomenclature of her first “oneman show” in New York. In a profound act of quiet rebellion she has worked in virtual solitude almost her entire career, and in the fertility of that uncorrupted environment has created a lush bounty of paintings.

Recently, in the documentary titled “A Delicious Battle” which was produced in association with this exhibition, Sylvia stated that she is half-painter and half-farmer, which is also to say that she understands both growth of the soil and growth of the soul. In her remarkable paintings, the eyes and the hands do work together to bring forth life. We feel this exhibition presents an opportunity to see a rare body of work in full bloom.

Sylvia Fein’s obsession with the independent, disembodied eye is no mistake. Her paintings, like the eyes they often picture, serve as accessible channels between a practical, time-bound, “seen” reality and a reality that lies beyond the visible in which mind and spirit intertwine, forming a web of vibration that connects all things. Fein carefully coaxes this vibration momentarily into palpable form through layers and layers of egg tempera paint, allowing us to glimpse the transcendent, poetic world beyond what the normal eye can see. This web might be called nature but could also be called cosmos, and it is shared by us all.

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Self-Portrait

eye sees an olive tree 2006 Egg tempera on board 4 x 6 inches

myself as an olive tree 2004 Egg tempera on board 51/2 x 23/4 inches

hands

2006 Egg tempera on board 6 x 8 inches

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sylvia fein

Surreal Nature