Abstract, for me, is very meditative and intuitive. My subconscious always comes through in all my paintings but more so in abstract. What I am feeling, thinking, what is going on around me, emerges. It can be filled with any of the wide range of emotions from contentment to deep grief, ecstasy to anger, emptiness to overwhelm, and on through the complicated and far reaching plethora of human feelings.

Blue is seldom the main color of my paintings but it seems to be a favorite with a lot of folks. I so I pulled these together to make their search a little easier.

Coast Rica is a small, quiet country in Central America filled with wild nature and gentle people. My husband and I traveled to this place many times. After the first trip we realized what we loved the most were the wild places where we could watch animals in their natural habitat. We watched Resplendent Quetzals building their nest and macaws breakfasting on tree nuts. I watched a young Capuchin monkey munch on a large lime green insect and a mother Spider monkey with a baby clutched to her take an enormous leap from one to tree to another. And at night we listened to the roar of Howler monkeys and hiked the trails with a guide surrounded by a sea of eyes. We drank sugar cane juice what can been squeeze in front of us and saw trees so full of iguanas that they looked like fruit on the tree.

Encaustic is created mixing bees' wax and damar resin. It has to be worked in its molten form and each layer has to be heated with a torch or heat gun in order to adhere it to the layer below. Too little heat and it doesn't adhere, too much heat and you can melt through multiple layers and create a flow. I just recently started working with it and have lots more to learn.

I remember as a child swinging on our oak tree watching the morning sun shine through the leaves and creating all different kinds of greens and lights. That is what fascinates me most about flowers, how the light changes the colors and creates the forms. It is hard to capture but I will continue to try.

These were all done within 6 months after my husband's death and relate to that.

These are related to the death of my mother.

I obviously do not do a lot of these and even when I do it is more a portrait of an object rather than a true still life. They just don't hold the same fascination for me as the less contrived. A still life has to be set up and put together and so it is all me. A flower or a landscape and even an abstract is a natural event; something created by an Other that is filled with spirit and its own life.

Yupo is a plastic paper that is very slick. It does not absorb the way cotton paper does and thus the paint slips and slides all over the place. Hard edges are created by lifting dry paint as are white areas.