She paints to intensify the experience of being outdoors in light and wind, watching nature closely as the sun moves across the sky. She is painting to understand the lichen and beach plum, the sea and clouds, the pines. Her practice is one of abstraction and simplification as she strives for light veracity, rhythm, and precise spatial resolution. She considers how the geometry of a two dimensional composition relates to the complicated natural phenomena she is there to study. She asks what colors have the power to express the gestalt of a subject. She is interested in a tension between abstract summation and naturalistic representation.
During her last semester of Architecture school, BS Arch Penn State, she took a figure drawing class, and that was it. She studied figure drawing for years at the University of Seville, and with John Michel in Charleston SC, and studied painting at the Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia and with Douglas Balentine in Charleston. She also had the chance to study paintings in museums of Europe for five years while living in Spain and Italy. Over time it became clear that her mother Lorene’s landscape watercolors were a strong influence. Her first exhibition was in Seville in 1990.
Since 2010, she has taught figure drawing, perspective, and beginning drawing and painting, first at Cambridge Center for Adult Education and in Newburyport, then at Castle Hill, PAAM, and privately in Provincetown. Currently, she is working on uniting her interests in landscape painting and figure work.