Let's start with the basic proposition that the process of making art is the hero's journey-an arduous voyage of discovery into the depths of the self. No matter what its goals or motives, the process is always necessarily the same. The best art, from this viewpoint, is the most unsparing, the art that makes the most rigorous demands in discovering the truth about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. These are the ultimate, deep, inner questions we must at least try to answer if we are to find fulfillment in our lives and work. And they are the questions Miriam Wosk pursues in her mixed media paintings.

First, though, we have to deal with the outer world which, as the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire suggested long ago, can be seen as an infinite system of signs along the way, of "correspondences" which seem to offer us meaning even though we may not precisely understand or interpret them. If we pay close enough attention, these physical manifestations along our path speak to us directly, at the level of intuition and emotion, without necessarily revealing specific meanings to our rational, thinking minds. For Wosk, as for most visual artists, they take the form of the materials and images she finds at every turn. In this most recent series of works she has discovered a basic structure-a road map, as it were-in the cut-out paper patterns used in the construction of apparel. Flimsy, brittle, and covered with directional signs in language, linear design, and numerical indications, they are laid down and left visible as the background against which she works, at once a perfect emblem of the underlying pattern of creation itself, and a statement about the distinctively feminist energy which lays the ground for all her work.

The first works in this direction are emphatically titled "Pattern Paintings": Patterns of Perception, Patterns of Surrender, Patterns of Identity, Patterns of Transcendence-four steps, we might say, along the path to either self-discovery and eventual enlightenment, or the making of an artwork. Having laid down the paper ground, Wosk creates a series of seamless layers of collaged images, hand-applied paint, gold and silver leaf, applique'd fabric and a variety of ephemera, all integrated into a cohesive whole with a transparent finish that takes on a quasi-antique, sepia hue. She draws her images from those areas of reality that figure most importantly in her consciousness-whether the external resource of lived experience, or the internal resource of the imaginative mind. Some of them borrow with bold insistence on cultural archetypes that have come to signify the feminine-the sensual, often highly colored, almost baroque arrangements of fruits, flowers, birds, or other elaborate design elements. Others, more abstract, have reference to her passion for the traditions of art and, by extension, artifice. Others still, geometric, symmetrical, or illustrative (as in biological or medical treatises), encompass the realm of science; and the occasional text or word brings in the element of language.

Wosk has the eye and instinct of the magpie, picking here, there, and everywhere for the signs she will incorporate-or not-in her art work. An inveterate collector, she surrounds herself with objects picked up in flea markets and antique shops; her shelves are lined with books gleaned from every source, from art bookshops to the antiquarians and bibliophiles along the Parisian quais; she has boxes and drawers filled to capacity with charts or etchings that have caught her eye, with buttons and bows and ribbons, with costume jewelry and beads-all items rescued from the ocean of cultural obscurity into which they threatened to disappear. A part of her art, then, is the act of reclamation and recycling, a testament to the mysterious life of things. Objects-as-image are incorporated notably in the series of tondos, the circular works which form, as it were, the mid-section of this body of work. In these more playful, sometimes gently surreal works, she allows a greater role to the delights of accident. As though to alert the viewer to her playful intent, she incorporates references to children's books and games, along with the bright, reflective beads or scraps of gaudy jewelry that enhance the surface with their dimensional presence, nostalgic icons separated from their origins and assigned to attract and trap the eye in their new environment.

Building on the discoveries of the "Pattern Paintings", too, she carries them over into the circular form of the tondo, adding a new structural element that seems to underscore at once the multidirectional quality of her investigation and-in its evocation of the eastern tradition of the mandala-the spiritual intention of the work. Unlike the rectangle, which tends most often to enclose the picture within its frame, the circumference of the circle offers no starting point or end, nor does the inner field suggest or require specific orientation. We are left to journey freely in these little universes, our eye attracted, sometimes slowed or speeded up, sometimes arrested in its path by a word, an image, an injunction: "Let me alone" bids one of them, in "Miriam's Song"-and we are reminded, this is the inner space of Miriam's mind we are invited to travel in: this is her world, her truth, her snapshot of a transcendent reality.

Pursuing her battle for formal freedom against the tyranny of the rectangle, Wosk next tested out her method on the asymmetrical, unstretched surfaces of which the compellingly obsessive "Objects of Passion" is a prime example. In this painting, the conventional, even cliché'd "beauty " of such images as the rose, the songbird, the dragonfly is contrasted with the darker, more threatening beauty of the snake and the skeleton, and the clearly invented internal organ that forms the centerpiece. A composite of distinctively, almost aggressively male and female elements, it is also at once biological and botanical, organic and decorative, realistic and surreal. With the ambiguous, dark appeal of deadly nightshade, it demands our fascinated gaze. "Oh! I was happy then," reads the text that arches over the lurking figure of death, underscoring the painting's metaphorical bonding of fleshly delights with physical decay, and opening the path for Wosk's most recent works, which investigate the nature of bodily existence and the common structural patterns that inform all living things.

Unlike those works described thus far, these newest pieces work with a single central-and notably anatomical-image, with which all the outlying forms are articulated. That the pseudo-scientific, biological structure of these central images is primarily vascular, is seen perhaps in its simplest expression in "Art of My Heart." The organ at the center of the picture plane glows hot with color, while its decoratively patterned arteries and veins reach out to articulate the increasingly cooler surrounding spaces. The heart-mandala lies at the center of the universe, reaching out, as it were, to colonize the distant celestial bodies. The more complex "Seeing From the Heart" extends the metaphor with the inclusion of the seeing eye, which here becomes larva, which in turns becomes moth or butterfly-a narrative embodiment, perhaps, of the act of perception itself, the emergence of beauty from the heart's eye. It also elaborates, as do others of this latter series, the variety of forms that grow from the central organ: the veins and arteries become roots and tendrils, coral growths or algae. The lacy decorative frills are metamorphosed into biomorphic forms, the whole veiled by the delicate web of a galaxy studded with tiny, star-like pearls.

These most recent works are clearly celebratory of the body-mind complex, and yet they are also essentially melancholic, if for no other reason than that the subject of their investigation is life itself, and therefore also life's inevitable counterpart, decay and death. Separated from their bodies, these lovingly-presented skeletal parts and vascular organs are slightly overblown, even obsessive in their beauty. In confronting us with them and inviting our contemplation, Wosk reminds us powerfully that beauty and repulsion are as inextricably knit as body and mind, or life and death. This is the paradox she presents in the aptly titled "Simple Truths"-that our lives are at once fraught with almost intolerable beauty and threatened moment-by-moment with decay. Our greatest potential as human creatures, she suggests, lies in the ability of our consciousness to hold both simultaneously in mind, with clarity and equanimity. By asking us to contemplate the inside of our bodies and reminding us of their fragility, she also puts us in touch with the very essence of our human lives.

• Peter Clothier