As a woman over sixty-five, I live with our culture’s campaign for my disappearance.  As an artist, I defy it. I look in the mirror and I draw and paint images of myself, large canvases that put my aging face on display. This unflinching exploration, tracing of time’s marks on the curves and planes of my body’s surface, literally gets under viewers’ skin, needling their assumptions about “beauty” and forcing them to confront their reactions to the very propriety of my offering, and their accepting, an aging woman’s visage as an object of aesthetic contemplation. Some say I have courage.  I know that I work from necessity.  My work claims my aging body, the dignity of its passage through time.  These paintings say no. I refuse to disappear.