Original Works by Beth S. Goldberg

This painting is my love letter to women — the central figure rising with her arms open is every woman I have ever admired, and the rich, layered world around her holds all the roles she plays, all the things she carries, and all the beauty she brings. She rises above it all.

I was captivated by the theater of fashion — not the clothes themselves but the confidence, the bearing, the way a woman moves when she knows she is being seen. The figures emerge from that glowing blue-green atmosphere like apparitions of femininity at its most assured.

We all wear masks — some we choose, some we inherit, some we barely recognize as our own. I painted all of them at once here, the central face dominant but the smaller ones pressing in, reminding us that who we are is always more layered than any single expression.

I wanted to capture the mythic scale of New York — not just a city but a civilization, its towers rising like a mountain range against the sky. The limited palette of grey and white gives it the timeless quality of a legend, a place that feels both real and entirely imagined.

This painting haunts me a little, because I made it before 9/11 and it felt like a premonition — the buildings dissolving and collapsing into each other, the dripping and dissolving forms. It remains one of the most emotionally charged pieces I have ever made.

This is the piece where I pushed surrealism as far as I could — I wanted every element to be slightly impossible, slightly out of scale, floating in that dreamlike space between logic and feeling. The lightning bolt is the energy that holds it all together, charging the whole scene with tension and wonder.

My life has always been in motion, and I painted this in the same spirit — grabbing color and pushing it across the surface with everything I had. The complementary clash of orange and blue, the hot pinks against the black, is exactly what a busy, joyful life feels like from the inside.

I mixed plaster of paris with sand and carved directly into the surface before painting over it — so the movement you see is also something you can almost feel with your fingertips. The shapes seem to be in motion even while frozen, which is exactly the paradox I was after.

A walk in the woods always restores me, and I wanted to hold onto that feeling the way you press a flower in a book — so I collaged and painted the trees the way memory keeps them, more vivid than real life, in colors that pulse with the joy of being outside.

My grandmother came from Russia, and the matryoshka doll always embodied her to me — that quality of containing multitudes, of warmth and strength wrapped together. I painted this figure with all the color and richness she deserved, because that is how I remember her.

I was drawn to the raw energy of fire and earth — the shapes here push and pull against one another in a rhythm I can almost feel in my hands. The warm palette of sienna, black, and white has the quality of embers: still and glowing at the same time.