These 4 paintings, ‘Sister’, ‘Ladders and Ladders’, ‘Dharma Wheel’ and ‘Brother’, were begun as one picture, of a girl draped over her brother’s coffin at the funeral of a young American soldier killed in the Iraq war. Early in the process, I started to work on them as individual paintings that would stand on their own, and in the end, showed them and ‘sold’ (donated them to auctions where they were sold) them separately. It is kind of a model for how we live with the actual war, we just focus on our immediate surroundings, and we don’t ask a lot of questions. We feel the ways we are affected but don’t necessarily know how that fits with the world around us, or with what our own neighbors are going through It’s a coping strategy, for me in my painting, as well as for all of us in society that allows us to bear witness and empathize without becoming overwhelmed.