I started painting still life when my mother, still living in France but starting to fail, decided to move back to Connecticut and shipped all her belongings here. Those “things”, many chipped or cracked, had been collected by her over the years, and she brought them together with her extraordinary talent into rooms full of beauty and warmth, the rooms of my childhood. Into each new house we moved to (and there were many) she reassembled them into home. When they arrived into our attic, they were lonely and boxed but each still held a piece of her and a piece of me in them. When my brother asked for a blue and white pique-fleurs, I asked if I could paint it first (to somehow hold onto it) and started painting still lives, or as I call them: “landscapes of memory”. It is a rich field that I keep returning to...