My art career began when, as a five-year-old, I picked up a crayon and doodled my premiere landscape on the kitchen wall in my hometown of Vienna, VA. (My mother was not impressed, but she admitted decades later that she had admired my natural talent and my sheer audacity.) At the age of eight, I taught myself to oil paint and worked at it for the next ten years. After high school, I wanted art school, but the family muttered veiled warnings like, "You'll sleep under a bridge!" and "You'll starve!" In retrospect, I think they worried that I would end up mooching off of them. So, I went to college, got a teaching job, and spent 40 years as an English teacher and Gifted/Talented specialist. I have zero regrets. But now that I’m retired, I’ve returned to my first love. I started with pastels and have recently added oils back in.
I am primarily self-taught with some valuable workshops thrown into the mix. I worked with a plein air group through the Zoll Studio of Fine Arts in Timonium, MD, for around a year; took a pastel workshop with Lisa Mitchell at the Central Pennsylvania Pastel Society; participated in a workshop with Barbara Jainicke at the Landgrove Inn in Vermont; attended a workshop at the Cape School of Art in Provincetown, MA; and will return to the Cape School in September 2024 for more study. I’m a member of the Maryland Pastel Society and the American Impressionist Society.
I’ve exhibited my work at the Zoll Studio of Fine Arts in Timonium, MD; the Howard County Arts Council in Ellicott City, MD; The Artists’ Gallery in Old Town Ellicott City, MD; several shows sponsored by the Maryland Pastel Society; and the Highlandtown Gallery in Baltimore, MD, where I am regularly represented. In January 2021, my pastel painting “La Petite Grocery, New Orleans” won the prestigious Covington Award at the Open Exhibit of the Howard County Arts Council.
My non-art education consists of a B.A. in German, an M.A. in English, and an M.A. in Gifted and Talented Education. This led to a long, successful teaching career and full fluency in German.
I see myself as a representational landscape painter who fully embraces the impressionists’ emphasis on color, light, and temperature, and I’ve learned to see color in even the darkest shadows. My favorite philosophical summary of my painting process is the epiphany that when I paint a tree, it’s not really the tree that I’m painting, but rather the effects of light on the masses that make up the tree. For me, this neatly summarizes the approach of the colorist temperature painter.