Arapoff's figurative and portrait works combine a high level of technical training with sensitivity and imagination.
Arapoff's early training at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts immersed her in traditional academic methods, including the study of anatomy and copying old masters.
She went on to teach art at Newton College of the Sacred Heart in exchange for a scholarship; one might surmise that Arapoff's sketches of girls such as these depict some of her students / classmates at the time.
In 1970s New York City, Arapoff began to work in oil, creating delicate small works inspired by 19th-century photographs while also painting people in her own life.
Her portraits -- whether of humans or animals -- captured the sitter's character.
Her figurative work addressed social issues -- decrying, for instance, the horrors of war -- while extolling an idealized vision of love.
After moving to Philadelphia and discovering a community of artists at the Philadelphia Sketch Club, she explored a range of styles in her portraits of models.
Her 2012 stroke impaired her dexterity, and her subsequent work never displayed the precise lines of her pre-2012 work. But her work gained a luminous mysticism; the figures in her late work are often set in tender and mysterious landscapes.