Because Toby Judith Klayman is a San Francisco artist of such experience, productivity, originality, generosity depth and breadth that it is hard to capture her in just a few words here, this is the first of three visits with Toby.
She knew early that she wanted to be an artist, a career as far removed as possible from the path of the particular proper marriage that her mother had chosen for her. Toby says her parents were sorely disappointed, but a calling is a calling, so left Rhode Island for Massachusetts and eventually to San Francisco where the gallery owners received her with more than enthusiasm. She lived between San Francisco and Greece, and spent decades teaching art at SF City College.
Life was beautiful and brilliant in so many ways, yet there was more than an echo of sorrow in her heart over the baby girl she placed for adoption and missed every day. To hear Toby talk about this is a lesson in so many kind of love that it is understandable only when you hear it from Toby herself. She talks about the letter she wrote to be placed in the court files in case her daughter should ever search for her birth-mother. It is a love letter of regret and longing. It is a letter that changed two lives once again forever.
Toby, as always, shares herself and her love for both her talented and beautiful daughter, Susan Harris O’Connor, and her husband, the artist Joseph Mack Branchcomb, with total candor, humor and power in a way that is uniquely Toby Klayman.