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Statement

I paint abstract oils. I am influenced by the news of the day and by my surroundings in the rural slice of the northern California coast where I live.

Color applied with palette knives, squeegees, rags and brushes, texture created with multiple layers of paint, plus shapes and movement, are used to express my ideas.

The story is about our ability and inability to play well together.

About…

I worked as a machine embroidery artist for over 20 years, creating large scale 2 and 3 dimensional pieces… until midway through the pandemic. While the speed of stitch had been part of the appeal, suddenly it became frustratingly slow. I began taking art classes online, trying various media from acrylics to pastels to collage and oil pastels.

With the help of an art mentor, I got up the courage to try oil paint. I also learned new ways to think about the process of creating art. For me, stitch required painstaking design and planning, including digitizing on the computer, followed by days of stitching on an embroidery machine. Oil painting on the other hand, allows me to jump right in with whatever wants to be painted that day, even if it changes massively during the visual editing process. It is a much more joyful process.  

While my inspiration remains unchanged—the natural world, the sky, the sun, ephemeral movement and flow—I now work much more spontaneously in the abstract than i did as an embroidery artist. I received a diploma in 2004 in Creative Studies—Design and Embroidery through City & Guilds of London, and currently work with an art mentor to explore creative direction and implementation.