Back to "Shabbat with Lily." Its immediate inspiration was a broken romance. In 1986, pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, [Corrine Var]ón found herself alone one Friday evening. So she bought candles and flowers "in order to make herself feel beautiful." It worked. She regained faith "that everything would be all right." In the painting, she depicts herself kindling the Shabbat lights, dressed in a sheer gown that reveals her maternity. The features are exaggerated, but the composition demonstrates someone at peace.

While ancient Greek sculpture presented the body as an ideal, Varón's pictures convey idealism through the fluid lines of intersecting forms. She creates motion on the canvas by means of "shadow painting," a technique that she developed in the '70s. By this method, she interprets "the same figure moving in time," based on a silhouette of herself moving. For example, in "Everlasting Love," patches of warm and neutral hues form a single, undulating shape consisting of six intertwined bodies. Likewise, two peaceful, violet and blue figures in "Beyond Eros" lie entangled, separated only by a faint line. "I want my art to scream 'love'," Varón said.