About

While I was still at University in Southampton, my BFA was concentrated on drawing and that is where it stayed ,but as I began working as an artist assistant on murals and faux finishes in homes and restaurants in the New York and Connecticut areas and spending every weekend and break earning money by painting, I became accustomed to painting on large walls and large projects and not the smaller canvases of art classes. These projects were great practical experiences, as it turned out, because I ended up doing that exact type of painting for a living.

A couple years after graduation I moved to Dallas and spent the next 25 years painting large scale works for commercial, medical and residential clients and raising a family while putting my own painting interests to the side. During 20 of those years I did commercial work for P.F.Changs Chinese Restaurants, laying out the design and hand painting murals for their locations all over the globe. I would work with the corporate office and then directly with the general contractors on site and their blueprints to make sure the sizes would be correct and the murals would fit exactly where they were supposed to be when installed. The techniques for laying the color in and the style sense that I used for these murals still have a huge influence on the design and color decisions I make in my own work.

In 2017 I was finally able to start spending more time doing art for myself and saying yes to a lot of random and interesting projects That I had never taken on before. It started with saying-

“Yes” to doing a background panel for a Wes Anderson film,

“Yes” to a full wraparound mural for a trophy room with freedom of design,

“Yes” to being a scenic painter on a TV show pilot…which led to saying…

“Yes” to being a scenic painter on a Martin Scorsese film, for 7 months, followed by more TV shows.

“Yes, yes, yes”

All of those experiences were intriguing, interesting and challenging, while being great learning opportunities for broadening my toolbox of skills and meeting a lot of great creative people along the way. During all of those projects, I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my own practice. Discovering the aspects and power of color and combining realism, detail and abstraction make me very happy and quickly draws me into a creative zone. Zooming in on detail, especially on things in nature satisfies my desire for organization (which is not my natural state). Doing commissions where I get to use all of my previously learned and developed techniques have made the art creation process very gratifying.

Creating works that have hyper realistic imagery, and then layering the images with a slightly dreamy, mysterious quality and using geometric shapes and abstractions create a good story in my head. I find the questions that this combination raises to be very interesting to me. The painting may push the viewers, too, to look for answers - Where was this scene? Where were these flowers? What is behind them or to the side where we can’t see? Why did she choose this imagery and does it have a meaning behind it? Why did she focus on this particular image? I think most art should raise some of those questions.

Whether I am using tints of ink or paint in both rich and subtle colors alongside patterns, or gold or silver leaf, black lines, and moody backgrounds, I am trying to merge all the various visual languages and ideas - that I have mentally kept in their separate boxes -into cohesive, standalone pieces. I want the works to contain all those things that I find visually exciting.

My own art may, and often does, contrast with a lot of my commissioned pieces for designers and private clients. They have specific input and they want a certain image or look. Having done commercial work for so long, I still find it relatively easy to create someone else’s idea, so when you look through my website, it may be hard to decipher what my style is, and that is fine for me because I can’t really nail it down to a specific “style.” I have about 10 different art show themes going through my head at once, and none of them are the same. I may pull off a cohesive look at some point and love it, but I also don’t want to get stuck doing the same thing for ages or with little variation. Painting in the same style every day would be like eating the same thing every day, no thank you.

So. As you look through my works, you will see the differences and some similarities between my past and present work. I am in all of them as my work as an artist evolves.