This is my art. You can see updates on my artwork and videos on my social media.
Instagram @drhennyk / Tiktok @drhennyk / Facebook @ Henny Kupferstein.
073025 – Saba and Baby
18” x 24”
Backstory available upon request.
- Instagram reel of day 1, live painting
- Instagram painting reveal with original inspiration photograph
- TikTok painting reveal
072525 – A Chassidic Holocaust
11” x 14”
Backstory available upon request.
- TikTok live painting, 2 minute reel with Belz chassidic music, original sound
051025 – Encourage One Another
16” x 20”
I imagine myself as this chassidic girl, exhausted and cold, waiting for this obligatory wedding to end. I encounter this Severely Other alien, an English-speaking little girl with a smartphone, who compliments me and treats me like a Muse. I have never experienced being a muse, and only with encouragement did I consent to holding a fake limp rose and pose. Mainly, because the adults were too self absorbed to notice, protect, intervene, or judge. Also, I may have thought it a curious opportunity to see myself on camera. I don’t judge her for not mustering a smile. Her pout is enough to show that she did the best she could. I brightened the colors with neon paint, and backed off the face when I felt that I captured her expression. I’m glad she doesn’t look like a generic portrait on my wall. She does draw you in, but not for long. A fleeting muse, not amused. Unlike Picasso, the photographer saw her as an independent individual with agency, rather than an object of inspiration. The overall sentiment suggests a fleeting moment of connection and recognition between two individuals from different worlds or backgrounds, observed with a sense of non-judgment and empathy. Maybe I just wanted to rescue her from her holocaust.
111124 – Sacred Myths
24” x 36”
Cleopatra and Medusa are entangled by burdens inherited from an ancient myth. The serpent wanted a baby and all living things performed within a social story. The bird is the primordial ancestor still alive today that bears witness to the results of a sin that is not so original after all.
082524 – Sisterhood
24” x 36”
Description: Five women are either pregnant, nursing, or pregnant and nursing at the same time.
051524 – Hummingbirds
24” x 36”
Acrylic on Canvas
Description: In my therapy, I have been pushing gruesome and gory through me and out of me. When I felt too absorbed, I asked someone to tell me what they wanted me to paint. Technically, this is my first commissioned artwork. They said, “How about two hummingbirds sitting together?” I made it my own by adding a third hummingbird, a branch, a loving embrace, and metallic paints. The background is neon yellow and green and hangs on the wall outside the kitchen.
050324 – Pride Pride
16” x 13” – Rehomed to a Social Worker’s office in San Diego
I had been painting blue babies and barefoot pregnant women for a year, and was hungry to make progress. After freestyling, a green ogre overshadowed the character who is cradling a newborn. To annihilate that imagery from my mind, I had to replace it with something more promising. Here I depict the hope of women and family being in the same place when new life is witnessed, rather than made.
042924 -Jay Street, Brooklyn Family Court
24”x 36”
Acrylic on canvas
Description audio is on the Whats app group
041724 – Cis Gender, Transgender, Gender-Bender)
20” x 24”
acrylic on canvas board
Immediately after I experienced taking up more space, I triumphantly wanted to take up way more space. Although I still struggle with eye contact and facial expressions, I utilized the body language to indicate pride and style, freedom and perspective.
041324 -Taking up more space
20” x 24”
acrylic on canvas board
Immediately after I experienced taking up more space, I triumphantly wanted to take up way more space. Although I still struggle with eye contact and facial expressions, I utilized the body language to indicate pride and style, freedom and perspective.
041224 – Taking up space
My therapist said that every time I experience re-traumatization, I curl inward. If the focus of one task can lead to feeling like I am taking up more space, I might accept that I too have a place to exist.
101423-Rock and a Hard Place
15” x 19”
At first, there was a rock and a hard place. Then, there shone glimmers hinting a chance for hope, and so she dressed to catch the light.
051723 – Sunbeam
10” x 13”
A figure with double mastectomy leans into a garden hammock and breathes deeply the moment the ray of sun hits her face.
112822 – Brooklyn in November
16” x 32” – rehomed to a Law office at 40 Wall Street, NYC
I returned from New York in November 2022 and immediately tried to mix some paint colors to emulate the smog and slop of Brooklyn when it was assaulted by melting snow. The figure is doing her own singing in the rain bit, wearing impractical couture when surrounded by puddles reflecting in the streetlamps, but entirely appropriate when summoning up the courage to walk through it. If you’ve been to Brooklyn in November, you will likely feel a crawling shiver from this scene that is neither pretty nor horrible.
090322 – Brooklyn Pigeons
18” x 24”– rehomed to Berkeley California, private home
My mother called me a pest. In New York City, pigeons are the number one declared pest, second to rats. They install stabby gates on ridges and roofs, awnings, and park benches. The pigeons are free to fly to New Jersey but remain where they live, audaciously eminent. As a child, I watched the pigeons for hours, wondering why they don’t fly off if they are hated so much.
081522 – A Tiny Waisted Polish Prince
16″ x 20″
- Portrait under gold lighting (with narrative).
- Painting from live model
- First time using gold paint
081022 – Alice, the Portrait
070222 – Woman with Eggs
13″ x 15″
I was boiling some eggs and was admiring the blue gas flames when I was triggered by the memory of this mundane task that I had to do for most of my adulthood. Every Thursday morning the Shabbat cooking began with a pot of boiled eggs. The figure is refusing to make eye contact with the task, and is visibly sucking in their physique, shrinking into nothing but its objectification. Gender motivated violence is represented by the refusal to play the role of an assigned body type, while unable to hide it or go away. The abdomen symbolizes an unsafe space to confront each week.
Framing
071622 – Father Daughter Portrait
070822 – Nia Drummond
We were music majors and I met her in a piano practice room. When I heard her sing, I told her that one day, she will be famous. I told her that she has star qualities. She laughed it off and I asked why. She shared her experience as a teenager trying out for American idol. She made it to the auditions round, and the camera followed her from the waiting room and down the stairs toward the stage. That is where she tripped over a step and rolled down, and because people were laughing, she ran away and never auditioned. On the news, the highlight of the auditions report was ‘fat girl rolls down’ the stairs heading to her audition. In COVID, Nia premiered in Carnegie hall, and I painted her image in this “I Told You So” canvas.
070422 – Roe v Wade
11” x 14” – rehomed to a Law office at 40 Wall Street, NYC
I knew I would be pregnant and hurting but I didn’t know I would also be barefoot. I am human, hear me roar. The yellow radiates the pain regions, the flaming labia and swollen ankles remind the viewer that domestic terrorism doesn’t start with forced shaving of a teenaged wife’s head. It starts with the withholding of health education, denying coping mechanisms, and traumatizing body shame.
062922 – Savant Girl on Fire
11” x 14”
Acrylic on Canvas
About this Painting: I had a moment of awakening when I was assigned in my music therapy field placement to work with a young adult who got paralyzed from the neck down when she fell down the stairs in high school on her way to band practice. On the iPad, she spelled her favorite artists, and I sang This Girl is on Fire while she gripped a mallet and matched the beat in open fifths on tone bells. I got a call from the activities director the next day telling me that her parents wept when they found out that she was offered a communication opportunity and that she was making music again.
031722 – First Cellist
Conquistadors in Dominican Republic
A visual narrative chronicles the plunder and destruction faced by the indigenous Taíno people of the Dominican Republic. European colonizers are depicted with harsh, angular features and dark, militant clothing, hauling their loot of cigars, bananas, mangos, and cocoa beans to their merchant vessels. This scene captures their disregard for the land’s natural beauty, as they ravage the landscape, uprooting groves and orchards, symbols of the island’s rich bounty. The tears of the indigenous Taíno, witnessing their near extinction, fill the beaches, highlighting the tragic cultural loss.
Picasso 1901 “Child with a Dove”
Oil pastel and watercolor on Mixed media art paper
A dear friend showed up to my hospital room with an emergency art kit. When I saw the picasso green palette, I immediately wanted to copy this original 1901 painting. The boy looks so tender and innocent, and seems to be offering a peace sacrifice. The emergency art kit has been taken to other friends in their hospital moments, and once more for myself. Everything that is produced from this kit is striking as an existential emergency
Fainting Couches
The psychedelic trafficker showed me his piano, but I couldn’t help wondering if I was in a house staged for tripping. There were three fainting couches and the paintings were suggestive of horror and dissociation. This was the first time I walked away from a piano without touching it. He had his mother’s ashes in red velvet atop the lid. The planter is the only object in this painting that is centrally aligned.
My painting of Chassidic women dancing in Times Square hangs in a mental health clinician’s office where she does intake in the women’s shelter where I was first recognized as a victim of domestic violence. She says ‘every day, women ask about this painting, and then find their own strengths.’
Henny Kupferstein 