My life has followed two parallel tracks. Professionally, I’ve had careers focused on service work: nursing, psychotherapy, Hakomi (Somatic Psychotherapy) Teacher. At the same time, I’ve followed a variety of artistic paths to express my vision of the inner human world, of nature and and our interaction with the world around us through photography, oil painting, ceramics, sculpting, pastels, acrylic painting and collage. Abstract painting was a surprise to me. It is as though an invisible thread pulled me through everything I have painted from oil to acrylic to oil again, from otherworldly abstract cloud-like landscapes to allegorical images. I love all the possibilities.
Art has always permeated my life in a myriad of ways. My mother was a remarkable artist. I grew up with my uncle's paintings of Montana deer and mountains. My brother is an ink and watercolor nature artist. During my 20’s, I was enthralled with photography, then infatuated by oil painting. Later I was obsessed with ceramics & sculpture, studying under the tutelage of Jim Romberg, Raku Master/ 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. Those paintings reveal a combination of serenity and tumultuousness, alive and full of movement and all coming together like poetry. Recently, however, I enrolled in an Art Academy and am now doing the absolute opposite: oil realism.
Still, after painting I feel like I have adventured and explored and declared; I leave the room feeling an exquisite peace with parts of myself newly wedded.
