About Me
My Background
My first validation for making art was when I was 3 years old. I loved watching Romper Room with the hostess Miss Lois. At the end of the show she always looked through her “magic mirror” at her viewers and asked them to send in drawings of specific things. I loved doing this! My older sisters would help me mail the drawings and Miss Lois would send me postcards of her on the set of Romper Room. I still have these images today. This experience got me making making art and I never stopped. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I studied Art History – then I took a painting class. The result was a double major and subsequent graduate work at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. I’ve been a professional artist for over 30 years and still find new things to learn. I live and work in Kalamazoo, MI with my husband, son, our border collie Lucky, and our cat JoJo.
Portfolios
Covid-19 Work
My work uses patterns to vividly represent human emotions and experience, and to convey not just beauty but tension. As the world has changed these last few months, the patterns of my life have changed (anthropologist Jane Guyer has dubbed it an “enforced present”). I’m not alone in this. My daily dog-walks have become a pattern for survival, and I’ve come to see that my neighbors — walking their dogs, jogging, biking — have their own survival patterns. With this, my work is changing. Old patterns are being destroyed, and new patterns are beginning to emerge. I'm working on a new body of work that is about our shared moment in American history, our creative resilience, and transformative struggles.
Recent Work
My creative research combines Indonesian textile patterns, processes and tools used in batik painting (an Eastern painting process using a hot wax resist and pigment dyes on textiles) with Western encaustic painting techniques (a painting process invented by the Greeks using hot beeswax and pigment fused with a heat source). The patterns, processes and materials I use, challenge me to respond in the moment. I establish rules at each stage of the painting that I have to work within. Every decision I make abdicates some element of control of the work. This parallels the way we move through life as human beings, making the work a manifestation of the existential. With that said, I also just love to paint – each painting is a learning experience – fresh and new. I still believe that art can change the way we move through and see the world.
Work Installed
My work can be see in person at Addington Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.