Sometimes you need to step away from the hand-to-hand combat that is family life to see what's right in front of you. Traveling together on a family vacation you don't miss a thing. You see one another unblinkingly under the raking light of airport waiting areas, in unfamiliar living quarters, and with the third, rainy, monopoly-filled day in a row. This is where I find my current inspiration.

Summer 2005/6: Time spent in a charming, but small, Martha's Vineyard home (called "The Shack") with four moody teenagers planted the seeds for a group of 20 works in oil and watercolor. The inward pull of adolescence trivializes the need for basic order (bed-making, table-setting, laundry) and scoffs at pastimes suggested by parents (a bike ride, a walk on the beach, going fishing). Where are the bonfires, the decaying abandoned farmhouses, and secret paths into dark woods? The exquisite natural setting of grassy fields edged by wind-stunted pines brings out the flavor of the secrets, conspiracies and daring acts.

December 2006: California. We visit La Jolla from our home in New York City. Together we play tennis, go ocean kayaking, and drive along the coast. The Pacific winter light on the rocky beaches, palm trees and Deco-Mission style homes conjures the Southern California of the early movie-making era. I'm reminded of my brief post-college foray into Hollywood as would-be film editor. I paint my mogul husband producing our vacation, my daughter the director, managing the close-ups and camera angles, and my son, Evan, 13 -- a foot taller than last year -- our matinee idol equally adept at comedy and drama.

Spring 2007: Staying in Paris on the left bank with my 16-year old daughter commingled my own Sorbonne study-abroad memories with this year's damp hikes looking for cafes with wi-fi. Tucked under our fine, French bedspread watching Sophia Coppola's movie Marie Antoinette fired us up for the Chateau de Versailles tour. Later, back home, I see Phoebe's own creativity taking form, with the grandeur of Paris and Versailles as the setting; this is another story I feel compelled to paint.

Visual storytelling, in whatever medium, intertwines technique and narrative. I take photographs and cull them into my source images - the genetic material -- for my oil paintings and watercolors. I make interim drawings as preparation for the paintings. The paintings go beyond the photographs and drawings in size, scale, palette, and physicality. With the outcome unknown, the paintings unfold as I see the images anew. The act of painting is akin to other risky behaviors -- including parenthood.

My stylistic references come from the Western tradition: 19th Century European and American Painters and American painters from the early 20th Century. But comic books and films by directors such an Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Sophia Coppola and Wes Anderson also inform the compositions, point of view, image selection, and sequence of my paintings. And as an alternative voice, the blue and white watercolors allude to 18th Century Chinese and English china patterns, such as Blue Willow. The cobalt blue-painted porcelain tells stories intimately, hand-held with breakfast or at teatime. Finally, while each painting in any of my groups stands alone, they are derived from a specific time and place and they belong to each other, like the members of a family.

Anne Sherwood Pundyk
New York City, 2007

At the door of the house, she sighed and reached for the knob. She let herself in, shutting out the dull pearl of the afternoon fog. She felt tired. There would be another gathering. She must prepare herself, the house, and refreshments--the miles of recipes she never finished because the guests were never finished. Politely, they would ask again and again for more and different dishes, endlessly consuming, complimenting her on each one. Again, she sighed, and shut the door of the dark old house, and once her eyes became used to the grim, brown half-light of the room, the familiar halls became apparent.

The way to the house's great kitchen was dim and almost labyrinthian, but she made her way easily and soon found herself in the house's only modern looking room. Here every convenience was available to her. The warehouse sized room abounded with Cuisinarts, microwaves, coffee grinders, espresso machine, wine corking and uncorking devices, and an unrecountable number of tools like egg whisks, wooden spoons and salad tongs. The cabinets and refrigerators were brimming with the ingredients her recipes required. Spinach pasta, zucchini pasta, carrot pasta, tarragon and capers, green pepper corns, pine nuts, sun dried tomatoes and peppers, chicken breasts, cornish game hens, salmon and sushi, veal, proscuito, pannetta, jalapeño pepper jelly, miniature summer squash, pesto brie cheese, cilantro, wild rice, mussels, kiwi, raspberries, apricots, mangos, heavy cream, olive oil, sesame oil, truffles, sugar peas, red peppers, black beans, tahini, chick peas, prawns, soft shell crabs, mustard seed, sweet 'n rough mustard, hot 'n sweet mustard, dijon mustard, and snails. And there were the chest high piles of loaves of French bread, wrapped like cords of wood land stacked along the wall, and the dusty, dark coolers for the wines and liquors she must match with their suitable edible mates. She wasn't sure where the recipes came from. None of the dishes reminded her of foods she'd eaten as a child, yet in a small way she sensed they were her grandmother's recipes. And she had to follow them implicitly. Each ingredient must be measured precisely and added at the specific moment the recipe dictated. She began to take stock of the evening's menu, lining up ingredients on one of the long oak tables, measuring and melting and blanching and pureeing until she could hear that the guests had begun to enter the dining room. Hurriedly, she wound her way back through the maze of brown halls to her dressing room, and as she chose the evening's attire, the guests' conversation could be heard. She listened with annoyance to their chatter. At least three of the men were called Tim. Tim had been wind surfing, and Tim and seen the Impressionist Exhibit and Tim thought the Zin was too dry, and Tim thought the movie was very surreal…it reminded him of Eraser Head. The were all so predictable, so comfortable… and so cerebral.

The dining room was sort of medieval-menacing, heavy, and dark. Huge, spiney metal light fixtures shed dull, orange glow on the throngs of tweeded or high-heeled guests. Meals were served at a black, knotty table, fifty feet long and ten feet wide, around which were arranged forty black, knotty chairs. The whole arrangement was unsettling, yet her guests mingled easily-networking, as they called it-apparently, adaptable to their grim environment. Soon she was serving the meal, smiling feebly and nodding with weak, pretended interest, irritated at the guests' inability to discern a blank smile from a genuine one. And again, soon, it was time for her to prepare dessert.

In the kitchen, she located the correct recipe and read softly aloud to herself the ingredients as she removed each item from its shelf. "1/2 cup dried apricots. 2 cups wheat flour. 3 brown eggs. 1 cup diced tomatoes…" She smiled. "1/2 pound cooked, fresh spinach." She began to laugh. Where had this recipe come from? She knew this was surely her grandmother's recipe, and she felt well pleased imagining her guests politely requesting another slice of the lovely apricot tomatoes spinach cake. She read the following ingredient, which was 1/8th cook's brain. Her brain. Her brain? She stood still for a moment, attempting to come to grips with this new development. An apricot tomato spinach brain cake. She added the brain, though she was not sure how…and stirred the repulsive mixture her ministrations had produced, orange and red bleeding into the murky gray and green. A blend of reactions confused her. Irritation. Why must she give up part of her brain for these annoying and shallow guests? Amusement. She delighted in imagining the guests' expressions when confronted with this hideous and frightening pastry. Vindication. Of course. It was perfect that she should clandestinely force feed them part of her brain. The more she thought about it, as she poured the slimy, lumpy mess into a greased bundt pan, as she smelled the fruits, vegetables and her own brain baking, the more she liked the idea.

Anne Sherwood Pundyk and Barbara Schultz
Oakland, CA 1986