My phenomenally talented mother, Susan Michod, has a new show of her Shroud paintings, which she started immediately after 9/11. She ended up painting them for the next four years. Haunting, filled with swirls of color and color’s absence, these paintings are among my favorite she’s done.

From the Artist Statement:

Shrouds. A shroud. Many shrouds. Paintings as garments, as veils. Paintings that conceal and in their concealing reveal new ways of looking at the world. 

My work, a series of paintings called “Shrouds,” combines my love of pattern with the face, creating the illusion of fabric folding, swirling and shifting over the contours of the skull. They were started before the events of September 11. But since that day the paintings appear more and more to me as crumpled facades. The spaces filled in with bright bursts of color, the textures deepened to incorporate differently hued whites. The white spaces are not so much empty as subdued and reflective. They are the eyes through which you view the storm. They are the silences between the lines. 

Each “Shroud” is a portrait of a self in continual change and a culture in crisis.