I’m semi-retired and it’s taken awhile but I found my true calling – it’s art – anything and everything to do with art, I love it, I breathe it and I live it.  Where did this love affair begin?

I grew up in Connecticut and as a youngster, my family would visit the New Britain Museum of American Art where my Aunt Betty was a board member and energetic supporter. The museum has an extraordinary collection of 19th Century and Hudson River School artists. If you have the opportunity please visit this museum. This experience incited my interest in the arts and I took many drawing and painting classes from local artists as I was growing up.

Thankfully my parents were very supportive of my art interest and and allowed me to attend a liberal arts prep school, Wykeham Rise, in Washington, CT.  College was Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota Florida. I loved the fact that my entire college experience was studio time with the influence and mentoring of highly creative people.

After graduating from the Fine Arts Sculpture program in 1985, I worked in graphics arts at Gamma One in Connecticut in a technical printing position known as prepress. Gamma One honed my color eye with years of color correction and retouching work for print material.

In 2011, I semi-retired and move back to Florida on the East mid-coast. I was inspired by the coastal beauty of Florida and began self teaching watercolor painting.

Last year, my husband Manning and our two cats took a 9-week trip across the country in our RV and this beautiful country and scenery was so inspiring I felt the need to paint or draw everything I was seeing.

After the trip I went to an artist retreat in Little Switzerland,  North Carolina and enrolled in a pastel class taught by famous artist and fellow Ringling grad-friend, Micheal White. I was hooked on pastels.

Pastels allows me to create with my fingers and it was finally a mix of sculpting and painting, I can mix colors with my fingers, it’s tactile and it’s visceral and I love looking at my dirty hands at the end of the day. You may see a few dirty paws on my cat Ollie throughout this website, hereafter referred to as my assistant.