Artist Statement
Aesthetics started as a way to escape the drudgery of life. Getting lost in the sensuous line of a hilltop at dusk, cumulus clouds during a monsoon rain: These are ways I enter a different state of being and make art.
I am interested in other worlds and dimensions, the spirit world, things unseen but felt, the way life forms emit an energetic field. I look at silhouettes of people and plants and love the graphic simplicity of a shape and then imagine the way watercolors can fill these forms in spontaneous washes, like life-force energy moving and changing as particle and wave.
I had mentors who taught the importance of being grounded and competent at depicting the tangible world, suggesting that I had to first focus on the physical and then earn the right to launch into abstraction. I took this message and ran with it before questioning if it really fit. After 20 years of painting, I have become more trusting of my instincts.
We can not be without influence, but we can synthesize and refine over time what we bring as individuals to the collective and to our own unique contribution of how we see and perceive life. Some of my influences are Odilon Redon, Nikolai Roerich, Georgia OÕKeeffe, Franz Marc, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Wick, Hermann Hesse, and infrared photography.
I attended an art high school called Interlochen Arts Academy. This is where I began to find my own compositional language through photography and creative writing. I took my first painting class as a freshman at Bard College in New York and after graduating from the University of Hawaii at Manoa I started exhibiting professionally. I have shown in Hawaii, California, and Colorado, and have been in numerous group and one-person shows and galleries. I also took time away from doing art professionally for a few years and earned a M.A. in counseling at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, NM. I am currently practicing in that field, as well.