coming to the paint

Before I could tie my shoes, I played a small accordion. I learned to sing harmony with my younger sister before she could talk in full sentences. I studied piano, saxophone, and then jazz and music theory in a music program my band director dad built at an otherwise limited Maryland public high school. In college, I studied theater performance, learning new forms of moving, composing and materializing sounds in transitory space. I acted, studied, and wrote poetry and plays. After graduation, I moved to Rehoboth Beach, DE, working as a bookseller at an independent shop and writing in between the moments of emotion and of contact, not narrating the beginnings and ends, but middles; the being in the middle of things.

Years spent in Brooklyn, NY and then Washington, DC had me drawing on big paper and literally taking the words apart. Disintegrating the shapes of the words into lines. Freeing the movement to create energy there on the page using circles, squares and color. Making lines, marking time and stories--making maps-- in charcoal, ink, pencil, and then eventually, paint.

Since 2000, I've worked almost exclusively on stretched canvas, in turns building large and small pieces, created in response to intuition and impulse as well as ongoing commission requests. I paint with acrylic and/or oil paint, using water-based crayon, charcoal, pencil and ink to mark my place, leave a note, add line, relay the maps, and offer an ongoing substantive record.

With studio connections in North Carolina, Iowa, and Oregon, I am continually influenced by the geography of a vibrant and sometimes virtual community of artists and activists. Encouraged to stay curious about the world, to paint the unpredictable musical form, the movements of bodies and words, the paragraphs and shapes and sounds set alight.