Having worked as an elementary school teacher, college professor, parish organist, choir director, composer, and software engineer, I come to the visual arts late in life, but find that painting draws deeply on my work in those fields: creativity in the visual arts has much in common with creativity in teaching, software design, and especially performing and composing music. While as a painter I am largely self-taught, I have also taken classes and workshops with Greg Lipelt, Mary Ann Inman, and Stephen Quiller. I moved with my husband to the Gig Harbor area two years ago after spending almost my whole life in the Upper Midwest.

I create watercolor and acrylic paintings, specializing in landscapes, plants, and abstractions based on natural patterns and forms. Many paintings are relatively realistic, inspired by my experiences and impressions traveling in the West and Midwest. Others spring directly from my imagination, and still others find their inception in specific materials, techniques, or compositional approaches. I also enjoy creating "improvisations" which develop through a dialogue between my ideas and the whims of the medium.

Most of my paintings, whether abstracted from reality or developed purely from my imagination, are designed before-hand (though of course I will modify my plans as the painting develops). Improvisations, on the other hand, begin with a minimum of pre-planning -- a color scheme, perhaps, or a specific technique I wish to explore, or a very general compositional focus -- and the painting then develops in dialogue with the medium. I find fluid acrylics a very grateful medium for improvisation. By working with acrylic mediums of varying viscosity at different parts of the painting or at different times in the process, I can control the amount of control I have over the result -- in effect deciding whether the medium or the artist will have the upper hand in the dialogue at that point.

It is my hope that all these works will give the viewer a fresh look at some of the commonplaces which surround us, a moment of visual delight, and an increased appreciation of the inherent structure and beauty of the natural world.