As an artist my plan is to continue to paint and explore my relationship to and with my chosen medium and how I can use that medium to express how I feel about what it is like to be alive. The serious health challenges I have had have forced me to live in the moment, allowing me to access heightened states of being and experience many different levels of energy. This moment-by-moment living spills over into my painting and allows me to discover for myself, and help others discover, feelings we didn’t know we had, thereby opening ourselves up to a deeper understanding of life.

I have been involved in many art forms during my life. Through I chose to pursue painting as my main form of expression, the drama of live theatre and dance and the spontaneity of playing improvisational jazz piano, have all informed my painting, keeping it alive, honest and meaningful.

A consistent factor in my work is the relationship I like to draw between my own emotional landscape and how it relates to movement and formation of form, line and color on a surface. It is a metaphor for how my life has allowed me to dive into the self, finding and working through experiences to show, in an abstract manner, what I have found, not just what I was seeking. Being stripped of my ability to communicate through speech, painting as my expression of feelings, memories and experiences becomes even more profound.

I paint with lithographic ink on paper, which has been mounted on panel. The colors of the ink are extremely rich and lustrous and the feeling of painting with them is akin to how it feels to pull taffy. The inks are very stiff, thought I often thin them with a medium that printmakers use. These inks give me a beautiful build-up of color and texture which add depth to my work. The physical energy it takes to apply the paint (ink) gets me deeply involved in my discovery of how the colors I use relate to my sense of form, and in turn, how it all relates to what I wish to express at the moment. I am celebrating life with every stroke and celebrating my love of the act of painting. Painting is, for me, the most profound expression of being, pulling me inward and at the same time giving me the opportunity to express the joy of life.