Making art has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.  My mother always commented about my ability to keep my hands busy and furnished me with crayons, scissors, etc.  My aunt who lived upstairs from us was creative and dabbled in pastels.  I enjoyed watching her and wished I could draw like that!  My favorite teachers in elementary school regularly included art projects in the classroom and I majored in art in high school.   My instructors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proved to be inspirational. I felt that I finally learned to “see” and also how to increase my color vocabulary.   My university level art classes were a real wake-up call but I was lucky to work with amazing, accomplished artist-instructors whose critiques, guidance and encouragement improved my work and formed the foundation for how I would work with students in the future.

At the U of I, I discovered and fell in love with oils, rich colors and became enamored with painting plants.  I certainly had enough of them around. Later, that interest expanded beyond my houseplants, especially when I visited places like Hawaii, the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Lincoln Park Conservatory.  Whenever I’m stuck for ideas, I revisit plants for their ephemeral nature, bold colors and dynamic lines.  Today, my exploration of texture and pattern in nature extends to animals. Most of my recent work is in acrylic or watercolor and I’m always game for new ways of exploring these media.

Mixed media challenges me to work a bit more freely and abstractly. I find abstraction more challenging because while wanting to approach it intuitively, I also want to find meaning in it. Sometimes this works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Pollock and Kandinsky were both abstract artists, but if one studies their work there are recognizable images hidden in their work, which makes for a bit of a treasure hunt.