The most compelling aspect of Kathleen Morris's paintings is the way they plumb the emotional depths, which is inseparable from their sensual beauty. The convergence of spirituality and sensuality-sensualized spirituality, spiritualized sensuality-that is the mystery Morris's paintings evoke.

They do so in part through their surface-dense, heavily varnished, holding light in their enigmatic depths, in a manner worthy of the old masters-and in part through their rendering of the human self-image, as it has been called. Indeed, her faces suggest simultaneously the heights of consciousness to which the human spirit can rise and the depths of suffering to which it can sink. Her fantasies- dream pictures-convey the strangeness and horror of being human, particularly a woman.

Many of her women seem on the verge of going mad, as though their own beauty and desirability had distracted them from the possibilities of identity, and the few men she depicts seem like lost souls. Yet the rich a