“I often don’t feel like painting is done until I can sense it looking back at me. ”
I’ve been a professional artist for twenty years. Though I’ve been drawing and creating things all my life, I only returned to college to finish my BFA once my youngest child entered Kindergarten. Once there, I fell head over heels in love with oil paint. After graduation, I grappled with the disappointment I felt in my finished paintings. Eventually I found a solution in not planning my paintings and letting intuition take over. This approach keeps it fresh and surprising for me – I never know what’s going to come off the easel next.
Examples of My Work
Hobby
Sometimes I write my favorite sentences from books and songs on dollar bills. I keep waiting for the day one of those bills comes back to me.
Brush With Fame
I rode an elevator with David Byrne in the mid-80’s.
Quirks
I suffer from what my daughter cals “Directional Insanity” – I have no inner compass and frequently feel like I’ve been blindfolded and spun around. Once when my children were small, I had to stop at a strip club to ask for direction. I’m eternally grateful for the invention of cell phones and GPS.
Fear
A cayman at the zoo once went nuts and tried to attack me from behind the glass. It was such a specifically targeted aggression, we must have been mortal enemies in a past life.
Awards
I won the Blarney Prize in second grade for a story I wrote and titled “The Day I turned Into a Bug.” It would be decades before I learned that Franz Kafka had beat me to that punch.