Arts Editor

Micheline Klagsbrun has been a psychologist, an editor and a restaurateur.

More to the point, she's a painter whose art has been greatly influenced by a first-century Roman poet.

The District resident's works will be on display at the Studio Gallery in the District through June 20.

Her muse is the Roman poet Ovid, whose Metamorphoses is a narrative poem about the creation and history of the world.

"When I first started painting, I painted trees with human forms in them because that's the way I saw the trees," she says. "The first of Ovid's stories that caught my imagination was the story of Daphne [a nymph] who was turned into a tree. According to Greek mythology, Apollo tried to seduce her and the gods turned her into a tree to save her."

Klagsbrun describes Ovid's stories as "timeless" with universal applicability and interesting in what they say about human nature.

"The transformations that take place in the stories are vivid in that they talk about people turning into rocks, trees, animals," she says. "They are inspiring to me visually because they excite my imagination.

"But at the same time on a different level, they seem to be about moments of extreme passion in which we transcend our physical being."

Her style has been to capture the "emotional essence" of the stories that comprise metamorphoses in her paintings.

In the past few years, however, she has been moving away from having a narrative in her work to focusing on the transformations themselves.

In addition to Ovid, Klagsbrun says she owes her passion for art and her painting style to her parents and a park near where she lived as a child.

Born in 1950 in London to Jewish refugees who had been native to Poland, the artist spent hours as a child exploring nearby Regent's Park. She says she grew up with the notion that the trees, rocks and plants she encountered "all had spirits, were alternative forms of life."

Her parents took her to many museums when she was young, and her father was a "Sunday painter" (literally -- "he would get out his paints on Sunday afternoons and work," she says). As a result, she recalls painting and drawing from an early age.

After receiving a bachelor's and master's degree in psychology from Cambridge University and a clinical doctorate from the Tavistock Institute, she came to live in the Washington area in 1974.

Her first job was with George Washington University's Center for Family Research followed by a child-bearing and -raising time-out.

In the 1980s, she and her family spent a year living in Paris and came back to open a restaurant (fittingly named Micheline's) in Georgetown that was open for two years.

Klagsbrun also edited Projections, the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Films journal.

But she had never stopped painting and drawing and decided in the early 1990s to devote all her time to her art.

A member of Am Kolel Sanctuary & Renewal Center in Beallsville, she has studied in Paris with Alfredo Echeverria and at the Corcoran with Bill Newman. Her works have been displayed all over the world, including at the Embassy of Finland, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Macy Gallery (New York City), Aswan, Egypt, and Delhi, India.

About 2 1/2 years ago, the Embassy of Venezuela's cultural attache invited her to display her work there.

For that show, Klagsbrun researched Venezuelan indigenous myths to see if she could find parallels there to classical Greek mythology.

Finding those parallels, she called her exhibit of works she had created Mirar/Mirror: An Exchange of Gazes.

"I wanted to convey that as a European artist, I was discovering another culture that was mirroring back to me familiar images," she says. "The Venezuelan experience helped my work develop a more dynamic style and intense colors."

Half of the 18 paintings on display at the Studio Gallery are from the Venezuelan embassy exhibit.