Her Story
Hope you will enjoy my work by wandering through this website.
From a very early age I had contented access to a private life, alone with my meanderings. I have almost no memories of school; childhood was summers in the country, hiding under mimosa trees or magnolias, happily hunched over my watercolors on typing paper. My mother had real paints but I didn't envy her artistic style. My goal was European realism as taught in my Saturday classes at the local Art Institute where we drew ears, noses, and hands from huge plaster replicas.
As a young adult, my mission necessarily shifted to paying for rent and food by doing portraits in New York City parks, murals on business walls, and a gamut of other peripheral art world jobs-salesclerk in the Met, modeling, art gallery work, custom sewing, interior remodeling, while attending The Art Student's League and every gallery opening and concert I could get to.
Eventually I went to college -majored in painting, sculpture, Chinese art history, and art education.
Then came teaching in Venezuela for a few years, followed by establishing a studio back in NYC, and later moving to Illinois where I had the social and financial support of grad school while completing an MFA in sculpture. Those were a productive 4 years, with access to a foundry, welding equipment, ceramic kilns, glass blowing, while my baby charmed my students or watched too many cartoons from his rocking chair in a corner of my studio.
I had begun to launch a true art career with national recognition when I let my momentum get exploded by an ugly divorce and even uglier custody battles.
It has taken years to regain my equilibrium: curled back into my private space mentally and physically, but that is where I currently find myself and where I am, mostly, content.
Thoughts
9/25 Most recent artist statement:
I live and work in the central Illinois community of Urbana Champaign. My practice takes whatever form I need to give materiality to the emotional place I am seeking to commemorate. I try to not say no to my impulses.
An artist statement from years back:
My work is inspired by landscape narratives: weathered surfaces, natural ephemera, such as late mornings on the beach hunting for shells. Trudging into the wet, heavy sand, I can only run a few steps before I'm mesmerized by rainbows in the sheeny edge of the water's retreat back into foam. I savor the flicker of light piercing the blues and the greens of the wave peaks, penetrating swords thrust into the side of the sea. I have the rhythm of them now, at last! Hold on to that, close my eyes to all the rest until I'm in my studio again.
Another time, here is the ruby of the sun caught in a net of my red hair, glittering with some little wind as I crunch through fragrant leaves, my little dog trotting ahead, my back still stiff after rooting through the garden to find room enough for more tulip bulbs.
Or at night, as the cold remembers us, the black Spanish lace branches weave and sway and creak. Are they flirting with me or too busy trapping the creamy moon?
Softly, softly, under the new snow, the late geese complain above the woods, and say goodbye as white crystal feathers fall, hushing into a rusty haze; the fields are a spotted hooker's green, the hills are indigo, no, caput mortuum, no, some color that continues to escape my paints, but I'll try again and again.
Then, when the bitter sharp gold of fresh willow leaves announce the new year, I search for all the first buds. Will pellets of hail shatter the fat ambitions of this spring's hostas? Turn the sultry pink velvet of magnolias to brown rot? Will it rain hard, thunderously? Dash down the daring flirtation of cherry blossoms? Will someone, somewhere be hiding in the filthy lea of a ruined cement wall or will they stand up, red mouth laughing, strip their clothes off, whoop and spin in this downpour? Will I see it all from my studio window? Will I be them before I come home?