Artist Statement:
Seeing Intensively and
Creating Joyfully

As an artist, I have joyously painted people, landscapes, cityscapes and still lifes. But I am particularly intrigued by rocks—plunging cliffs, gaping canyons, spiraling peaks, precarious arches, meandering arroyos, fantastic formations and all other manner of rocky sites. 

Rocks are fascinating.  They are as close to eternal objects as our earth can offer, yet they yield to our planet’s forces.  They are shaped by heat and cold, and they submit to water’s sculpting power.  They tumble down mountains with snow slides, and they break off from cliffs, crashing to a canyon floor.  Wind, rain, fire, earthquakes, and volcanos determine their shape, size, and color.  Over millennia, rocks endure these assaults, yet they only become more interesting and beautiful under the influence of nature’s destructive but creative power.

I love the process of finding and painting these amazing, enduring creations.  Living in the American Southwest, I have rich opportunities to come across scenes containing an incredible stage where rocks make up both the set and the characters.  There is delightful serendipity in walking up to the rim of a vast canyon, where a motley crew of large, wildly different rocks looks out across a deep gorge toward a lone pinnacle, presiding over its stony congregation.  Or coming upon a field of sand where massive boulders lie in an artful configuration, providing the perfect frame for the iconic Pedernal in the distance.

The experience of painting these wonderful scenes is endlessly engrossing.  As the work progresses, each rock takes on a distinct personality, and these characters begin to form relationships to each other and to their environment.  And I develop an attachment to them, motivating me to find just the right composition, color, and approach to faithfully bring to life my latest work of art.

Biography:
A Personal Renaissance

After a robust career leading non-profit, social and economic justice enterprises, I finally embarked on a path I had long dreamed of taking: learning to use oil paints to capture my own vision of the world.

I launched this effort in December of 2018 as a student at the Compass Atelier, a suburban DC art school near my then-home in Kensington, Maryland, benefitting from the skill, empathy and instructional excellence of the Atelier’s founder, Glen Kessler. From that moment, I became committed to being an artist, painting daily for hours and pushing myself to learn, persist and revel in the joy of bringing an artistic dream to life.

An early painting earned me an award in my first juried show in 2019, but soon my artistic life became a solitary one, as the pandemic restricted all contact to Zoom confabs. Those circumstances helped motivate a move to Santa Fe, New Mexico in the Fall of 2020. Here the desert and canyons of the west have become my inspiration and my teacher and the high desert light my illumination.

I have been thrilled to find people who resonate with my paintings, having sold numerous pieces of increasingly greater size and value. I have found my “rock people,” both in New Mexico and online and relish those relationships.

This artist’s life of mine has only just begun. New joys and challenges motivate me to push into ever more deep and refined ways of bringing each painting to life. I wake every morning excited to take the next steps in my personal renaissance, and I welcome your company on this journey.