Once the new Feminist ideas were released, there was no stuffing them back into their narrow boxes. My career in Chicago was finally launched. In 1974, ten years after coming to Chicago, I had my first solo show of paintings at the Artemisia Gallery. Vera Klement

In 1972, at the height of the feminist upsurge, a call went out to women artists in the Chicago area to discuss the formation of a non-hierarchical cooperative feminist gallery. I went. The meeting room was packed with women. The group voted for four of the women present to be a committee that was to select thirty women for membership in the new gallery. I was one of the thirty. We named our gallery Artemisia, after the glorious Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Vera Klement

We talked [in the consciousness-raising group] about the difficulties with our husbands and lovers—their betrayals. We examined a woman’s life, sex and self, feeling and mind, ego and world, freedom and tradition, creativity and enslavement. And slowly, slowly, the painful loneliness that my marriage had built around my life like a smooth cold wall began to hold the possibility of a door to a place where there were others who cared, who understood, who had perhaps suffered similarly. I felt less alone, less abandoned. Vera Klement

It [consciousness-raising] was a profound shakeup. I learned that much of what I’d suffered throughout my life, what I had thought was uniquely mine, was actually experienced by many women, I’d always hated my body with its crooked spine, hated my lack of pigment. But in this sheltered room in East Hampton [New York], among women whose perfect figures I had envied, I learned to my surprise that they had suffered the same disappointments—hating their too small, too large, unequal or droopy breasts, the stretch marks of childbirth on their bellies, their flat asses or spongy thighs. Vera Klement

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