I grew up in rural Maryland in the 1950s and ‘60s. I was very fortunate to have an accomplished artist as a neighbor; she taught weekly painting classes for children in my neighborhood. We were quite young and painted in the studio with oils and sketched with charcoal on newsprint plein air. Over the years I have come to appreciate how lucky I was to have this experience so early in life.
I took classes in painting and sculpture in my early 20s. I painted in acrylics, mostly from dreams, but also from images of urban landscapes. Over the many years since I sketched and painted with watercolors but did not re-engage fully until my children departed for college over a decade ago. I now paint almost exclusively in oils.
I have a strong, almost binary aesthetic; I can be pretty picky about how items should be arranged and what constitutes a compelling composition. This sense of alignment becomes a governing hand in my decisions of what I wish to paint. I am quirky by nature, and my paintings reflect this. I enjoy bringing to life ideas that deviate from absolute representation and move toward a peculiar realism.
