About the Artist

I was born on Weaver Air Force Base, South Dakota, and spent my childhood on various military installations in the US and in Germany. I have been making art for most of my life. At the age of  five I was struck by how satisfying it was to draw little figures on the back of a birthday card in crayon. Then a family friend gave me a little set of watercolors. And in first grade I was introduced to tempera. I was hooked.

In a high school art class, I found that although I could draw realistically, making abstract paintings was more interesting. I fell in love with the early modernist paintings of Kandinsky. The relationships between shapes, color and lines fascinated me, and those things eventually became the basis of my work.

I majored in Art at East Tennessee State University, took lots of figure drawing classes, flirted with surrealism and the painting techniques of the Old Masters, but soon after graduation, rediscovered the joys of abstraction, with an emphasis on color. I painted assiduously while working at various day jobs, exploring spatial, linear, and color relationships.

In 2018 I retired from my final day job as a technical writer, moved back to Johnson City from central Pennsylvania, and I rediscovered oil paint, drawn in by its luscious texture and color possibilities. I then I branched out into oil paint sticks, which dry very fast, usually overnight, allowing me to build up layers very quickly.

During my COVID isolation, my paintings uncharacteristically took on shapes that became evocative of real-world images, so as a committed abstractionist, I had to subordinate them to suit the nature of the whole painting. But remnants of unfiltered pieces of the real world remain in a few of them. I attribute that invasion to effect of spending almost all of my time alone in my house, with very little in-person human contact for so many months. 

My Post-COVID paintings have moved in a more purely abstract direction but the occasional "that looks like . . . " make its way in. But mainly I continue exploring the relationships between shapes, lines and color.