About My Work

What draws me to an artwork I want to live with is the fine balance between seen and unseen, expressed and not, wherein questions are raised by the artist for me to answer.  And the answers change over time.  

As a figurative painter I tell stories, and the juxtaposition of one or more figures in unexpected settings adds surprise, mystery and sometimes humor to the story.   I’ve worked in various media and styles over the years, from expressionism to abstract and back again.  Sometimes I start with a blank canvas, other times I turn an old painting upside down and begin a new work, deciding to keep some of the underpainting in a new context.

A Seismic Change

I grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula, graduated from Stanford and raised my family in Menlo Park where I practiced Interior Design for 25 years before I began painting in 2008 with a studio in Redwood City.  Deep roots. 

Even before the 2020 pandemic I’d had a long break in my work, spending two months in Verona, immersed in Italian.  I returned to the U.S. only weeks before COVID erupted and brought life as we knew it to a halt.  Many artists’ creative juices, including mine, ran dry.

And then I moved.  A Northern Californian my whole life, I overnight became a Southern Californian, as my husband Jim and I and our dog Coco left our mid-century modern in Menlo Park for a vintage cottage in Santa Barbara, all during COVID lockdown.  My studio and creative work went into storage for another year, but every day my senses took in the newness, the light, the utter beauty of this place nestled between the mountains and the ocean.  

Summer 2021 the world began to awaken from the worst days of COVID, and I rented space and started painting again.  And as it turned out, the nearly two-year ‘disruption’ proved transformative.  My years of experimentation coalesced into a new, personal voice:  a flattened rendering of the figure,  simpler compositions, a larger role for the landscape (abstracted yet recognizable), a bit of pattern and a high-key palette infused with light.

It’s no surprise these first paintings (“Wet Paint” and “A Sense of Place”) give a nod to living in this paradise I call home, but I am eager to tell stories that were percolating before Covid in this new vibrant and light-hearted ‘voice’.  Stay tuned!