About

As a self-taught painter, I have taken a longer, more circuitous path to becoming an artist.  After years of raising and educating my children while owning a business I helped build, making art is a privilege I have earned, a room of my own.  
My work focuses on the human face and its landscape of light and shadow.  I find my models in vintage amateur film and photography showing ordinary people in forgotten moments, alone and unaware of being observed:  shopping at the market, riding a city bus, waiting for a streetcar.   These are public faces, guarded but showing a vulnerability that catches my attention. 
My paintings break the contours of the face into discrete regions and use strong colors to accentuate these divisions.   In my current series, I cut the face into fragments, which I then stitch onto a stretched canvas or paper with heavy waxed thread.   In some works, the pieces are disjointed, with gaps between them like grout lines in mosaic tile.  Sometimes a part moves out of alignment, or one side of the face seems to sag or drift away.  In other works, the parts are stitched back together, as if the face is attempting to heal itself. 
I leave the knots, stitches, and fraying edges visible to show how the process brings together the craft of needlework and the art of oil painting.  The layering and stitching give a depth and texture to the surface like a raised-relief map.  Several pieces are further built up with felt underlayment or stiff canvas molded into three-dimensional shapes, but this remains essentially a process of preparing a canvas for painting.