For more than 40 years, my work life has followed two parallel tracks. Professionally, I’ve had careers focused on service work: graphic designer, psychiatric registered nurse, counselor, somatic psychotherapy teacher. At the same time, I’ve followed a variety of artistic paths to express my vision of the inner human world: photography, oil painting, ceramics, sculpting, pastels, acrylic painting and collage. Abstract painting is a surprise to me. It is as though an invisible thread pulled me through everything I have painted, from still life and portraits of my youth to recent landscapes full of clouds … into this world without recognizable form. How fun to approach a clean canvas with no idea of how it will evolve. This is certainly “being in the moment”!
Art has always influenced and permeated my life in a myriad of ways. My mother was a remarkable artist. I grew up with large canvases of Montana scenes full of deer and mountains painted by my uncle. My brother is an ink and watercolor nature artist. During my 20’s, I was entralled with photography, then infatuated by oil painting for still lifes and portraits. Later I was obsessed with ceramics and worked under the tutelage of Jim Romberg, Raku master and Professor at SOU in Ashland, Oregon. I later studied pastel painting during a time when I traveled a lot; when the accoutrements of ceramics were too cumbersome to ferry. Each journey through these various art forms provided the platform for the next endeavor.
Immersing myself in acrylic has been a homecoming. I fell in love with the spontaneity of abstract, like unveiling a secret unknown to even the artist. Many of these paintings spilled out like a birth, forming themselves into otherworldy lifescapes. These paintings reveal a combination of serenity and tumultuousness, alive and full of movement and all coming together like poetry. After painting I feel like I have adventured and explored and declared. After painting, I walk out from the room feeling an exquisite peace with parts of myself newly wedded.
