About the Artist

I have worked with rich materials for most of my life, starting in childhood, with paint and clay, and as a teenager, stone. In my twenties I moved into textile sculpture and paired wool with metal. After 40 years of a career as a developmental psychologist and teacher educator I have returned to art-making. Disappearing for hours into this work parallels a similar lapse of time I experienced being with babies and toddlers in my professional career. 

I create my own collage papers using acrylic and tempera paints, then tear​​ and re-assemble them, creating overlapping planes. In many of the works on this website I have worked by gluing papers onto ledger sheets from the early 1950’s that bear notations made by my father in the first few years of my life. Returning to artistic expression after such a long time I found myself wanting to work simply. Using these 70 year old ledger papers as the base for my collage was trying, as the paper screamed when I put anything moist on it like paint or glue, and became a tutorial in the treatment of fragile old papers and ultimately, patience. The evidence for this educative process can be gleaned in the bumps and striations in some of the work, which is in keeping with this emotionally bumpy time.  Serving as a background, the ledger sheets create tension with the foreground: my colored shapes next to and over my father’s small careful penmanship. Once glued, I often make marks using water soluble crayons to emphasize tensions within. The Blues Series represents this aspect of my work well. 

Multiple world crises and iniquities weigh heavily on me almost continuously. Those sensations are represented here, but the counterpoints of connection and beauty within each piece provide a balance - a touchstone for whatever grace we can make or find. My intention is to modulate space, line and color to evoke movement and emotions related to the unspoken uncertainties of our lives. As a climate activist much of my work represents abstract expressions of the tensions we live with, such as the Perturbations Series. I am also hyper-aware of civilization’s race against time. Pillars of Time  and Collapsing Pillars of Time are the first pieces of a series that represent our usual sense of time juxtaposed with metaphorical pillars that are crashing in much the same way as melting icebergs.

In the past few years I have studied with Bruce Dorfman and Deborah Winiarski (distally) and taken workshops at the Woodstock School of Art with Meredith Rosier and Robert Ohnigian. 

My work of the past few years has been show locally upstate:
Olive Free Library-Olive, N.Y. Fall,  2021, Small is Beautiful Annual Show. 
WAAM, Woodstock Artist’s Association and Museum, Woodstock, N.Y. Associate Member Show, Fall 2021.
EMERGE Gallery, Saugerties N.Y. , “Something Blue”. Spring, 2021
Art Students’ League, NYC. Open Studio Show, Jan 6-14, 2020.
WAAM, Woodstock Artist’s Association and Museum, Woodstock, N.Y. Small Works, November 29-December 29, 2019. Edwin Phillips Award for  “Unraveling”.
Woodstock School of Art, Spring, 2018, Student Show. Woodstock, N.Y.
Olive Free Library-Winter, 2018, Small Pieces - Group Show.