Art has always influenced and permeated my life in a myriad of ways. My mother was a remarkable artist and her creations always surpassed her instructors. 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 photographed and had a darkroom where magically images appeared from my efforts. My favorite was a series of Mothers and Babies in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which was powerful and well received by the public. Later I studied oil painting with Wolfgang Weiss in Boulder, Colorado, and painted still life and portraits in oils. After a hiatus of family and career, I immersed myself in ceramics under the tutelage of Jim Romberg in Ashland, Oregon. My work evolved into sculpting masks and torsos, using Raku as the unpredictable finish to labor-intensive pieces. I also studied pastel painting during a time when I traveled a lot; when the accoutrements of ceramics were too cumbersome to transport. Each journey through these various art forms provided the platform for the next endeavor.
Immersing myself in acrylic has been a homecoming. I took online courses and studied several artists, classes with Zoe Alowen in Ashland, Oregon, painting landscapes and seascapes for the first time, exploring light and form. After watching several abstract painters, I fell in love with the spontaneity of abstract, like unveiling a secret unknown to even the artist. I have been lovingly influenced by the abstract works of Cody Hooper, Jaanika Talts, Suraj Patel and Isabelle Zacher-Finet. I scoured instructional videos from Michael Lang in Liverpool, NY, learning how to use underpainting and washes to build up color that astonishes the observer. Such paintings have an emotional quality that spills out like a birth, a kind of becoming, forming themselves into otherworldy lifescapes.
My paintings sometimes resemble a cloud of gas and dust in space, lights or silhouettes against something luminous. It is dynamic energy, thrust forward; beckoning and luring you in, a gift bestowed and also sovereign. Channeling this has been enormously satisfying: to place on canvas what is originally conjured as an apparition or a premonition, and ultimately revealing longing and connection. Facing a blank canvas is wonderfully freeing. Rather than re-creating a known image from our world, I am unbound and can allow images to manifest on their own. 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 married.