revelatory nature, sometimes its wistfulness and hints of melancholy." While Bramson has remained remarkably consistent in her exploration of romantic love, her work—once described as "a riddle disguised as a love-letter"—leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Writer Joanna Frueh places Bramson in the "romantic Individualist" tradition of intense feeling, love-longing, alienation and morality, and considers artmaking and sex—including "the voluptuousness, risks, temptations and delights attendant on both themes"—as the implicit, twin subjects of her work. Dennis Adrian suggested that painting was a place for Bramson to explore states of feeling, dreams and fantasies that were otherwise risky, impossible, unacceptable or undesirable. Bramson seems to agree: "To me, making art is a difficult, intense activity where I can do a lot of things I wouldn't do out in the world. It's an area where I can function on a dangerous and erotic level. I'm sort of watching myself do it." Lynne Warren suggests that while her work looks nostalgically to a time in which longing and desire were satisfied in a slow, tension-filled unfolding, it also contains social commentary and political critique "that fully inhabit today's reality." While Bramson has generally been uncomfortable with strict feminist readings of her work, considering them too confining, writers have identified challenges to the power dynamics of relationships and societal structure in her work. Artforum's Colin Westerbeck wrote that Bramson's straddling of her private, domestic life and public, artistic one provided insights into the balancing acts required of women that are reflected in her contorted figures acting out exaggerated roles and accommodations to traditional expectations. Art historian Lisa Wainwright suggests these insights are also embedded in her strategy of collage, which parallels the way women construct their lives out of many masks, roles and identities. In her essay, "Feminine Wiles: Modern Art's Fear of the Female," New Art Examiner editor Kathryn Hixson highlighted Bramson's unapologetic reassertion of the emotional and physical power of the feminine in the face of the fear that the article discusses. Mixed media work (1970s) Bramson has described herself as "an archetypal 1970s art-school graduate," who abandoned painting in the commonly held belief that it was a "dead" medium. She explored ceramic, pastel, objects, fans, beads, sequins, glitter and fabric, fashioning doll-like, sculptural portraits, mixed media drawings, and assemblages that some suggest were influenced by her window display work at Marshall Field's.Zimmer, William. "New Wavering," SoHo Weekly News, Sept. 15, 1979.