About the Artist

For most of my adult life, I’ve taught composition, literature, and English as a second language.  When Covid hit, like many others, I spent a lot of time creating-- gardening, drawing, etc.  Having long blocks of time using a less verbal part of my brain brought peace in ways I didn’t know I needed.

I determined to protect these womb-like oases that occurred when making beauty. 

A year and a half into COVID, I shocked myself and quit my job.  Almost on a whim.  At 58, I resolved to give myself a year to learn to paint.  

I’m discovering that painting is less about what I bring to it and more about what it gives me.

The poet and philosopher David Whyte describes a beautiful life as one in which we “come out of abstraction and into an immediate experience.”  When painting, the noise in my head stills, and I’m “abducted”* by the immediate experience of color, texture, and shape.

Interacting with a canvas, somehow, makes way for my unvarnished and unrehearsed self to emerge.  I enter some timeless, fearless, peaceful place where “success” and “failure” are words that have no meaning.  There is only grace.