I fell in love with paint and making marks in Life Drawing art classes at the University of Michigan. Mignonette Yin Cheng required we work intuitively and use all of our media. Teacher and surrealist Gerome Kamrowski challenged my art boundaries and surprised me with “maybe you are a painter.”

The University of Wisconsin graduate art program invited many contemporary artists to work with us. I would watch and talk with Wayne Thiebaud while he created his colorful, impasto paintings. MFA in hand, I left for Greece and Crete, first to Amsterdam and Belgium to study van Gogh, Rembrandt and Vermeer. Then to the Parthenon in Greece and to walk Knossos on Crete. Back in Wisconsin I exhibited assemblage installations at the Madison and Kohler Art Centers, while designing at the University of Wisconsin Press. Buying land in northern Wisconsin, I lived close to Lake Superior. The Wisconsin light and our landscape of 40 acres inspired more than 10 years of Realism painting that I exhibited and sold in Madison WI, Duluth MN, Chicago and New York. My rural mailbox brought me volumes of art.

I grew up near Lake Michigan, later lived near Lake Superior, now study the ocean along Long Island, NY and the Dingle Coast of Ireland. Researching painters is a joy. The masters Turner, Ryder, Bierstadt, Church, Heade and more. Expressionists Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Soutine and Nolde. Joan Mitchell and Wolf Kahn — and many contemporary abstract and landscape painters. Museums, galleries and visiting artist studios are vital to my painting. Yearly visits to New York to immerse myself in art and, while there,weekends to the ocean at Southampton, NY. I love this ancient ocean, to study the breaking waves, smell the sea air, and bring these experiences home to my work. My paintings are intuitive and visceral — physical paint trumps the horizon line. Using paint and an expressive surface — painting turbulent waters or a calm shore — this is the mirror I hold up to reflect our human spirit.