Artistry in
Motion
“One thing leads to another.” This is the way I make art. I work in my studio with a few projects going on at once. My life is abundant with the sounds, colors and curiosity from my childhood, to the coming of age of and the flow of ideas and paradoxes, fixed values becoming fluid, and paths of bewilderment to wonder. As Whitman wrote in his Song of Myself, “I contain multitudes.” Each shows up in my writing and art, collages of color and space and there is a rhythm there. My artist friend wrote in big black letters on her studio door, “Art, like life, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
What you behold is what your eyes bring to you.
Everything is Connected
A gift of a hundred-year-old quilt made from scraps of men’s suits became the inspiration for my abstract quilt paintings. The shifting moods of the river led me into dappled water compositions. The adagietto in Mahler’s Fifth brings back the pale blue of dawn. Autumn hikes through aspen groves find their way into warm, layered fields of color—lines as imperfect and alive as the branches themselves.
Memory & Everyday Life
Winter’s log fires carry the scent of my grandfather’s cabin, where I slept with my cousins beneath worn blankets. That memory circles me back again to quilts, to fabric, to history held in fragments. One thing leads to another.
I paint white sheets pinned on a clothesline, curled birch bark peeling from trees, and other quiet moments from daily life that linger and return in unexpected ways.
A Life in Creativity
Creating art has always been a way of life. I have written books and taught courses on the creative process, Come To Your Senses, and shared music and art with school children and women in evening classes, often gathered together around conversation and wine.
My work is not about depicting reality. My Steinway, for example, appears in red—with pink pedals and black-and-white keys flying like movement and sound.
The Heart of Creation
My publisher has forced me to write an artist statement. I tell her that art is its own statement, but she has won, so here I go.
I do not paint representative art because I have a camera for that. It’s been said that my gift is in the blending of colors. Some of my paintings are loud and shouting for attention. A "Barbie pink" can sit between a green that bites your eyes and the palest blue that is dawn or dusk. I mix until they are harmonic. It’s harder than you think and that’s where my years of training enter the picture. My degrees are in art and music education, and I have taught 5 year olds who draw tulips with their chunky crayons for Mother’s Day cards, workshops with troubled teenagers, book club ladies who meet after 5 o’clock in my studio sipping wine to loosen their grips on the brushes. They enter joking about their fears of judgement and leave pleased like 5 year olds. I have written books and taught workshops about the art of noticing ordinary things: the seasons’ colors, the shape of a branch, the miracle of birch bark thin as parchment. We paint the branches and weave them into sculptures, or collect odds and ends from a construction site and fashion them together like Louise Nevelson's works in museums around the world. My studio is built on the banks of the Bigwood River in Idaho. If you’ve ever tried to paint “the moment of water,” you’d better have a month or two of time and a whole palette of thick paint. Not just blue and green, but little dots and curves of all the others. To find the flow, it helps to read the last lines of Norman MacClean’s A River Runs Through It. I never learned to fly fish, but I tubed down the river in Provo Canyon summer after summer and slept in the loft of our cabin listening to the creek that flows down from what is now Sundance on mount Timpanogas. That magic is the source and goal of my artwork.
Most of my paintings have a story before I begin.
I have a number of poets in my life, and I answer their words with my paintings. A poem has rhythm, too, which I paint in straight lines or smudged boxes or flows of circles upon circles. You’ll see this in my work. What you behold is what your eyes bring to you. That’s the point. I read Neruda’s Ode to Common Things and painted large wooden scissors, or yardsticks, each stroke a subtle measured color that you have to stand up close to notice. I fixed them together in 36-inch wooden squares. The edges are uneven because life is that way and seldom perfect. In a class on batik, I dyed white velvet fabric into dappled purple and wrote in thick gold cursive letters from a line of a sonnet. Wondering through thrift stores I find paintings and I refashion them, turning traditional shapes of vases and fruits and flowers into something Picasso might place in his portraits with all the eyes in the wrong places. He said “all art is copied,” and I take him at his word.
Quilting was part of the culture of my world...
Quilting was part of the culture of my world, and you’ll see that in my work. One of my favorite paintings was inspired by an antique quilt given to me by the innovative artist, Roger Thomas. It's made of the sturdy wools from fashionable suits of the 30s and 40s like those my grandfather wore to his law office on Main Street. It is obvious that the women who stitched it were artists themselves, the colors so subtle and sublime. They seemed slightly weathered, and my painting is a brighter reflection of that exquisite quilt. I don't paint for a living, but I do think that I paint to live. Like food and water and air, I am nourished with all forms of music and all frequencies of color. My music and my art have been the scaffolding that held me up when life was dark and I could hardly move. I have counted on them when I’ve been abandoned by truths that became lies, children who are ill, and even the sudden death of my healthy, newly married son. Some things, like nature, you can depend on. They say, “I know, I know,” and sit with you until you can breathe again. I do not paint those times. There is enough darkness in life to go around the globe, and I have no desire to paint it. I paint the vibrant, abundant life in living color. My paintings are not answers or instructions. They are invitations. What they mean is yours alone to discover, and I hope they find a place where they can truly belong .
Get in Touch
For pricing and availability, please reach out through the contact form. I’d love to share more about my work and the inspiration behind each piece.