Ancient Chinese:  “Everyone is acquainted with dogs and horses, since they are seen daily.  To reproduce their likeness is very difficult.  On the other hand, since demons and spiritual beings have no definite form and since no one has ever seen them, they are easy to execute.”
 
I am an expressionist.  I couldn’t be anything else; that’s what I’ve always been in all that I do.  My first art purchase was a book of Ernst Ludwig Kirschner’s paintings.  I came to painting through photography and the desire to express the memories more completely.  I was blessed to stumble into an abstract painting class and discover that I was in jazz painting – all that structure so one can appear to be free form.   
 
In my painting, I seek to visually convey the memory of feeling from a particular setting – in some cases the storm running through the mind, in others the calm.   So what am I doing?  Seeing the demons and spirits of the universe and hopefully making them more visible to you.  By doing this, making my own demons and spirits visible to self and maybe others. 
 
I do all of life in color – even a few colors liberate me to render what is in my mind’s eye.  My ten years at Polaroid informed my understanding of color theory, as well as color form and composition. That experience still influences my palette,  thinking in terms of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow, rather than primary colors.
 
My work originates from the time I spend knowing I am a small part of all this universe. My works begin typically with a scene photographed or remembered  impressions and feelings from multiple visits to a favorite place we hike.  Soon the paint takes over, merging all the memories of a particular place or of multiple scenes. 
 
I see the unexpected and inner images in the landscape -- the animal in the rocks, the waterfall in the leaves, the surreal abandoned items in the desolate landscape.  I am totally in love with the contrasts among the brilliant colors one sees among what many consider the mundane.  The abstracting of landscape into colors, forms and surreal elements forms the basis of much of my work. I work in stages, multiple layerings until I can see my sense of place in the painted surface.  Each piece is a part of my life, a celebration (or in some cases a mourning) of a place through time, a place in time or a time in place.
 
Recently I have realized that much of my work on southwestern subjects is the reimagining of this area of sedimentary deposits back when it DID have water.  The idea of water falls in the desert is only foreign if one is fixed in time.  The appeal of the southwest is that one is always a time traveler when there.