When I was a young girl I remember sitting on the stairs of our home in Tenafly, New Jersey, looking up at three watercolors of female nudes by Auguste Rodin. When we moved back to California, the paintings continued to draw me in. To look at them was to enter a state as near to reverie as a child can get—I was musing.

Images from childhood are deeply embedded. These early memories form the bedrock for any artist. Whatever shapes the mind, whatever gives form to art, is born from memory. The Greeks embodied this in their myths of the nine Muses, the progeny of Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory and Zeus, god of the heavens.

Many years later, I had the pleasure of living with those Rodins for a time when my father brought them to my studio to be reframed. I asked my father, who was a musician and recording producer, why he had chosen those particular watercolors. “I don’t know much about art, “ he replied, “but they were the most beautiful—they had rhythm.” It was as if a missing link had entered the room, a visit from a Muse.

I realized that all my artwork, no matter how abstract, owed a debt to these watercolors, to their rhythm that had taken root in my memory. Their presence in my studio inspired me to make a series of nudes using watercolor, powdered copper pigment and graphite on fragile, handmade paper. The paintings expressed human form in motion—elusive as water, yet sculptural. I called the series Muse.

I later paired this series of paintings with a selection of Pablo Neruda’s poems, translated by Alastair Reid, which spoke to me of love. Not just desire, not just fleeting, passionate love, but lasting love—naked, exposed, vulnerable, and receptive to what life offers. These later of Neruda’s love poems of love touched me deeply, joyfully.

In a way, all of Neruda’s poems are love poems. He loved being alive and recorded his moments of joy and sorrow, beauty and despair, love in its many manifestations. To him love is an essential life-giving spark. In a word, intimacy.

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Intimacies/Intimistas