This is Helen’s art, but it is NOT signed. Helen Harkaspi Original Portrait Faces Series Oil Painting 18X20 inches Art #14 – NOT signed. On reverse the name “Sarah” is written on the canvas bars. Some very nominal border paint loss. See pictures, ask questions. Just lovely, deep impasto technique with thick, almost 3 dimensional paint. Harkaspi is also well-known as the Ex-Wife of the late Bernard (Bernie) Glassman. An American Zen Buddhist roshi, and an author who had a deeply profound and long lasting affect on me when I first encountered his work while living in Brooklyn in 1998. Helen’s artist statement from her Website. Portrait painting is looking and seeing and looking and seeing is inherently risky. It is never a safe encounter. The painter never knows what aspect of a person will be most engaging and the subject cannot know if the painting will offer a view of the self that is recognizable. Image and self image, identity and mind states are shifting realities. There seems to be no one definitive self or image. The painting of a portrait is a meeting like all new and recurring meetings, an exciting opportunity, a chance to see and be seen, fraught with old hopes and suppositions, historic images, desires and needs. Neither the painter nor the subject can know what the meeting will reveal. The self is a life’s work, a work of art and artifice, of engaged authenticity and concealed and unrecognized fears and hopes. It is an ephemeral and necessary tool for engaged living and a dangerous and quixotic possession. Salmon Rushdie, in his fable, The Shelter of the World, referred to. Bags of selves, bursting with plurality.. A self, formed as it is in the crucible of culture, religion, and change with the raw materials of power, will, love, sex, and pride it is one of the most interesting games in town. And it can be a denial of our transitory nature, a denial of death. In a diary excerpt written two days before his death and published in the New Yorker, the writer, Joseph Brodky wrote, ” Identity is a shuck” and he compared himself to a raft plummeting down and coming apart in a wild mountain stream. As a psychotherapist and psychotherapy client, I’ve been aware of the power of these elements of mind, their mythic proportions in fantasies and dreams, and their ability to create realities that others don’t share. It is with these ideas and my pleasure in textures and color that I paint to play in the deep rich tonal satisfactions of falling into worlds that emerge from color and shape. I paint to realize the moment to moment shifting of mind/feeling states and I paint to capture their illusory permanence and resonance. Bernard Glassman on Wikipedia. Bernie Glassman (January 18, 1939 – November 4, 2018) was an American Zen Buddhist. And founder of the Zen Peacemakers (previously the Zen Community of New York), an organization established in 1980. In 1996, he co-founded the Zen Peacemaker Order. With his late wife Sandra Jishu Holmes. Glassman was a Dharma successor. Of the late Taizan Maezumi. Roshi, and gave inka. And Dharma transmission to several people. Glassman was known as a pioneer of social enterprise. And “Bearing Witness Retreats” at Auschwitz. And on the streets with homeless people. This item is in the category “Art\Paintings”. The seller is “drawn2distraction” and is located in this country: US. This item can be shipped worldwide.

• Size: Medium (up to 36in.)
• Region of Origin: US
• Artist: Helen Harkaspi
• Style: Abstract
• Listed By: Art Patron
• Unit of Sale: Single-Piece Work
• Painting Surface: Canvas
• Material: Oil
• Date of Creation: 2000-Now
• Year of Production: 2007
• Width (Inches): 18
• Color: Multi-Color
• Subject: Portrait
• Original/Licensed Reproduction: Original
• Height (Inches): 20
• Production Technique: Oil Painting
• Type: Painting