I have been a painter and Urban Sketcher for over 40 years and have earned a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston. Presently, I serve on the Board of the Art League of New Britain, CT, the Programming Committee for Ball and Socket Arts, Cheshire, CT and am the Administrator for Urban Sketchers of Central Connecticut. I have had my work shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with Arthur Yanoff, curated by Kenworth Moffett and went on to exhibit in juried shows throughout the United States, including the Mystic Art Museum, the Art League of New Britain, and the White Gallery. In Canada, I was an invited guest artist of the Conseil des Arts du Canada at the Symposium of Baie St. Paul. I have been an artist in residence at the Virginia Center for the Arts and the Edna St. Vincent Millay artist’s colony. Works are in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and in private collections worldwide.
Statement
Intrigued by man-made facsimiles of natural environments such as the compressed interiors of botanical gardens, I strive to capture the interplay between reality and artificiality. Colorfully gestural acrylic paintings appear to be drawn from the exotic locales of the American Southwest or the Caribbean. They are in fact compositions from manmade urban greenhouses, which are revealed through the precise placement of sculptural succulents or panes of reflective glass. The theme of nature’s reconquest can be seen in the scale and weighty personification of plant life, as well as the decaying detritus of human industry.
Following a deep tradition of women and botanical paintings, many of my paintings reference the historical gender bias of limiting women to certain acceptable subjects, just as women today are rarely allowed to be fully who they are. They turn to subterfuge to illustrate their meaning. One would assume that these abstracted botanical paintings represent an idealized beauty, but no less important are reminders of loss and wintering, the emptied seed pods and yellowing ferns. These paintings are meant to be beautiful, but look closer and another reality emerges. From the artist and critic Helen Hummel, “At first her work will appear chaotic and formless, but then it will burst into form and space in a most remarkable way.” My creative processes are a contemporary trompe l’oil, engaging the viewer to closely examine the depicted visual reality.