Artist Statement

 I think I must have been born an artist. My earliest clear memory is of sitting at a table at age two, happily making pictures.  As a child, I drew and cut out my own paper princesses, knights, horses and dragons.  I made ‘people' out of natural materials such as sticks and apples, clothing them with flowers and housing them in villages of moss and clay.  An artist is all I ever really wanted to be, but that path has been full of potholes and detours.  I'm now re-focusing on my passion, moving forward toward long-held goals. 

When I look at the work I've done since I started exhibiting professionally, I'm able to recognize common threads stretching back through time to my childhood, linking with the art I'm making now.  One of those threads is the way my work is created; whatever the medium, my process involves gradually building up transparent layers of color to form the image. This type of process feels most natural to me, and yields a luminosity and brilliance that satisfy me. 

Another commonality throughout my work is the idea of the sacredness of the earth and all of nature, and the vocabulary of symbols I developed as I sought to express this.  Closely related to this idea is the underlying theme of all my work: a deep belief in the unity and connectedness of everything in the universe.  At the most basic level, we are made of the same stuff as the stars, the trees, the air, the ocean.  Having come from the same source, we are all connected in the most intricate ways, both visible and invisible.  This belief is expressed by the transposition of objects, the overlapping of transparent images, and by forms that seem to become something else.  I'm constantly searching for more effective methods of revealing this mystery.