About the Artist
About the Artist
I was born in California but lived a rather nomadic life with my family until they settled in a small Mississippi town. Books always played an important part in my memories. They are tied to my dreams and as a talisman for how my childhood is remembered. Literature gave me a doorway into other lives – fanciful, dramatic, scary, intense, soothing or dreamlike. It was all there before me, to be gobbled up like a Thanksgiving feast. Books also gave me an introduction to an adult world that children are normally shooed away from. You know the old saying “little pitchers have big ears” but I had become the persona of a “bookworm” and therefore the adults imagined I was too engrossed in my books to be interested in their lives. While pretending to be oblivious to my surroundings, this was how I heard all of the juicy family topics.
The books followed me through childhood, adulthood, marriage and family. But instead of wanting to become a writer and following their flights of written imagination, I found I wanted express myself visually. Mushing paint onto a canvas was what made my heart sing and brought the same focus as the most riveting book from childhood. I started painting impressionistically because this was the style I was influenced by. I was taught by people like Charles Sovek who could tell great stories about his five marriages yet had more knowledge about color in his little fingertip than I’ll ever know. Another great influence was Kitty Wallis, a wizard with pastels. Once you got past her astringent grumpiness, she would enliven the room with memories of her hippy dippy, Haight-Ashbury days. Also Ken Auster, Gregg Cartmell, Doug Dawson, Greg Kreutz, Ken Hosmer, Neil Patterson, Morgan Samuel Price, Tony Saladino, and Ann Tempeton all imparted snippets of wisdom on art and life. I learned to really think about why I was painting and what “was my intent?” while attending the most recent workshops with Bob Burridge and the Intensive Studies Seminar with Skip Lawrence, Catherine Liu, and Christopher Schenk.
I had learned to make pretty paintings and beautiful landscapes. I reveled in each achievement, yet one day I awoke with a yearning to tell an unfinished story with paint. I wanted to start a story that would make a viewer finish it from their own perspective of life. So that’s what I do these days. I’m still that kid that reads, that bookworm that unknowingly listens in on other people’s lives (love those public cell phone conversations!). I paint the imagined story, the real story, the overheard story, the story I want to tell, the story you need to finish.
I was born in California but lived a rather nomadic life with my family until they settled in a small Mississippi town. Books always played an important part in my memories. They are tied to my dreams and as a talisman for how my childhood is remembered. Literature gave me a doorway into other lives – fanciful, dramatic, scary, intense, soothing or dreamlike. It was all there before me, to be gobbled up like a Thanksgiving feast. Books also gave me an introduction to an adult world that children are normally shooed away from. You know the old saying “little pitchers have big ears” but I had become the persona of a “bookworm” and therefore the adults imagined I was too engrossed in my books to be interested in their lives. While pretending to be oblivious to my surroundings, this was how I heard all of the juicy family topics.
The books followed me through childhood, adulthood, marriage and family. But instead of wanting to become a writer and following their flights of written imagination, I found I wanted express myself visually. Mushing paint onto a canvas was what made my heart sing and brought the same focus as the most riveting book from childhood. I started painting impressionistically because this was the style I was influenced by. I was taught by people like Charles Sovek who could tell great stories about his five marriages yet had more knowledge about color in his little fingertip than I’ll ever know. Another great influence was Kitty Wallis, a wizard with pastels. Once you got past her astringent grumpiness, she would enliven the room with memories of her hippy dippy, Haight-Ashbury days. Also Ken Auster, Gregg Cartmell, Doug Dawson, Greg Kreutz, Ken Hosmer, Neil Patterson, Morgan Samuel Price, Tony Saladino, and Ann Tempeton all imparted snippets of wisdom on art and life. I learned to really think about why I was painting and what “was my intent?” while attending the most recent workshops with Bob Burridge and the Intensive Studies Seminar with Skip Lawrence, Catherine Liu, and Christopher Schenk.
I had learned to make pretty paintings and beautiful landscapes. I reveled in each achievement, yet one day I awoke with a yearning to tell an unfinished story with paint. I wanted to start a story that would make a viewer finish it from their own perspective of life. So that’s what I do these days. I’m still that kid that reads, that bookworm that unknowingly listens in on other people’s lives (love those public cell phone conversations!). I paint the imagined story, the real story, the overheard story, the story I want to tell, the story you need to finish.