Artist Details

Born and raised on the San Francisco Peninsula, I found my passion for art while studying in Florence during my Stanford years (BA 1967). Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira were teaching on campus then, which may account for my love of the Bay Area Figurative tradition. After a nine year stint in banking and 25 years in interior design, I turned back to fine art. Color and composition were well-honed design tools, but starting in 2007, I spent much of the next four years in studio classes and painting workshops. Now, quick-pose figure drawing and more recently, pure abstraction, inform my figurative work. I am inspired by Van Gogh and Gauguin, Kandinsky and Hans Hoffman, all bold artists who broke the rules. I live in Menlo Park with my husband Jim and have a studio in Redwood City.

What draws me to an artwork is the fine balance between seen and unseen, expressed and not, wherein the artist raises questions for me to answer. And those answers change over time. Painting still life and landscape helped me technically move from description to expression, but I love the figure because it is here a story unfolds. I look first for the gesture, a cue to the underlying structure. Then I play with lavish color, bold strokes, lights and darks, thick and thin paint, syncopating the rhythm. And the element of surprise? Priceless! Bits of color shimmering through the over-paint... a risky palette knife stroke ... unexpected drips – all these wonderful surprises add immediacy and connect the two of us, artist and viewer.

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