To paraphrase Stella Adler, life can beat you down and crush your soul, but art reminds you that you have one.

About Me

As an Encaustic and Cold Wax + Oil painter I develop translucent, layered, textured and striking paintings that are alive with color. Through my painting, I attempt to understand what I feel about the world around me.

I began working (playing?) with wax as a child. I made my sister a 3D card out of wax when I was 13, and evolved into a batik artist. The minute that I began experimenting with encaustic and cold wax painting, I was hooked. I love that encaustic painting requires a strong physical interaction with materials. Moving wax on a solid surface is a dynamic and corporeal process. I scrape and mold, and sometimes just let the wax move on its own. The transformation of liquid to molten to solid creates movement, texture, depth and relief. Cold wax requires me to think about the impact each color willI have on the previous layer, and how to achieve maximum depth and complexity. Sometimes I struggle to get a message to emerge – and other times it materializes on its own. My work is abstract and abstracted realism, and relies on images, form, color, tone, scale and dimension. As observed by Aristotle, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”

Examples of My Work

Fun Facts

• • Travel - I visited the towns my grandparents emigrated from -- Nicosia and Mistretta, Sicily -- last April.
• • Professions - I have been a waitress, a non-profit director, a lawyer, a law Professor, and a legal designer of technology tools
• • Family - I have a son who is a Pediatrician and another one who is a software engineer. My husband is a retired banker.
• • Reputation - I am a nationally known expert in consumer bankruptcy law.
• • Travel - I spent 6 months in Australia on a Fulbright and am spending January in Tasmania (Australia)

More About Me