In Excursions Outside the Orangery Itzstein has explored motifs and representations of motherhood, as borrowed from luminaries such as Mary Cassat, Alice Neel and Arpita Signh. In many ways the original painting is the soil, from which she cultivates the final artwork, sometimes you will observe traces of the fertile ground, other times the garden grows bountifully masking the earth below. For Itzstein tending to a painting is like tending to both motherhood and the garden. The hardest part is knowing when to let go: to step back and trust that the artwork, the child, the plant, will flourish on its own.