I painted in silence and isolation for the first seven years in Chicago’s Hyde Park. Although painful, there was a certain benefit to be derived from rejection. As the Chicago art world ignored me and labeled me a New York Painter—with its subtext Jewish, I was forced to question the premise of my work. Were my ideas limited to geography, to a particular city? What kind of a painter was I? I had to define my work and my aims to myself with greater precision. My work matured. Vera Klement

Again, I was an immigrant, a misplaced artist [in Chicago], one who dealt with the contemplative, the sublime, whose work had developed out of the existential gesturalism of the fifties in New York and the traditions of European Modernism, tinged perhaps more than I was aware of with the melancholy of my early days as a Jewish war refugee. I found no audience in Chicago. The Jewish collectors avoided my work and its underlying content. Vera Klement

In my teaching I would frequently use this description of making perfume as a metaphor for reductive painting—as in the work of Mark Rothko, for example. Rothko’s paintings, I would tell the students, embrace the space and spirit of the world, its vastness and its tragedy. He would reduce and compress that immensity, essentialize it, the essence of life until that magnitude was reduced to two trembling rectangles—the Sublime. Vera Klement

Zoppot, my muse, my paradise lost, I remember you as in a dream—a luminous vision with a moderate climate and little humidity to diffuse the clarity of blue or sharpness of edge. A contrast of light and shadow, of warmth and coolness, of clouds forming gradually in the far distance to predict a rainfall several days hence. Vera Klement

I am a painter, a word that was synonymous with artist when I was young. I paint paintings with paint and have in an art world spinning out of orbit into a space of endless dazzling possibilities, limited my choices, set limitations to abide by. Rules, harsh rules that make “making” more difficult yet more intense, rules that keep me from empty repetition, from cranking out a product mindlessly as on an assembly line. Rules that lead to discovery. Limitations that lead to invention. Vera Klement