I enjoy a good struggle
I think my work is generally historical fiction. How can this be, when working in painting, clay, and mixed media?
It is about memory, about stitching together what really happened with what I dream. It is about a fixed idea that is altered by a child’s hand. A swipe of their paintbrush on top of something I have “finished.”
I paint in oils and watercolors
I work in layers of transparencies and drawings. I transform old books into three-dimensional paintings. I am interested in the spaces between.
I love the whisper of a paint stroke. I let go and let the brush do the work. My best analogy would be a golf swing. Pop-pops once said, let the club do the work. This line basically translated to don’t swing too hard. So I let the paint brush whisper. I sit down with an old book and as I let it wash over me, I let my hand alter it, letting my intuitive process guide me. At times, this requires great patience and courage.
I often find myself settling into a piece with a fluxing vanishing point – I don't always feel the need to sit on one viewpoint.
There is always a grand and imminent challenge of perspective in my space. I love Matisse. He played with this brilliantly I think.
I am also inspired by Louise Bourgeois and her vastness. She created endlessly and shared the need for it as part of her emotional sanity – or rather the tool with which she could hold onto sanity.
Emily Mason’s work inspires as it becomes a blend of painting and poetry.
I am heavily influenced by Morandi’s deceptively simple compositional play.
Mary Oliver’s voice follows me and bubbles up in my writing and life dreams.
Billy Collins humor and lightness as well his formality and attention to cadence and a love and need for the sound to be complex but simple and just right. It’s a taste and style thing untaught, unlearned, just felt.
I am transfixed by blue glass, and it’s relation to my home town of Baltimore.
For years I have focused on 4 very different glass vases. This has meant hours of sketching in inks. The more I gather, the more I learn. I am a collector of oddities, of objects. I handbuild mugs, plates, bowls, and platters in stoneware. They are comfortable pieces.
I have spent time sculpting arks as well. I hold a fascination with Noah’s ark. It is the beauty of a shape that floats and something that is carrying two of everything. Imagining two at time stepping aboard these, every time I build a new ark, I am amazed.
In my studio I linger in things I love:
Little emerging subtleties.
Glass.
Stems of flowers.
The human body.
Grace.
Innocence.
Shadows.
Light as all of life.
What is.
What we are.
Forgiveness.
If art can make explanations for the setting of a table, the intricacies with which I cook a meal, the feeling of a hand caressing my child’s face, then I can make sense of things.
As I arrange them, I begin to see my own history, and I desire to share it with my children, so they will understand me. Sometimes they work with me in the studio–their presence is not a nuisance, but it distracts me deeper into myself. Their influence on my work is apparent. I study them, as they study me.
