inspiration
To be honest, my attention span is short and I’m pulled in a dozen different directions a week. Much of my “art time” is purely in my head when I have quiet minutes to mentally test whether I can “see” how a piece will turn out and whether I can resolve any of a dozen technical or emotional (or both) issues that are nagging at me. I’ve learned over the years that if I can’t envision how a piece will look and feel the emotional tone I want it to convey, it’s not worth starting.
Maybe it’s because I have only a few hours a week to be physically hands-on with art making or maybe it’s because I’m essentially undisciplined, but I usually have too many ideas swirling to make an obviously coherent series of prints. It’s taken a bit, but I’ve come to accept this about my art making. There are, however, themes that I come back to over and over – time, layers, loss, injustice, endurance, hope. Sometimes these themes show up in recognizable, if simply rendered, objects and formats, but mostly they’re represented obliquely. It just depends.
technique
Despite all this thematic flitting (flailing?), or maybe because of it, I’m quite a rule-governed person who needs anchors. My first anchor is a precisely penciled grid that covers the entire field of rag paper. Every piece starts this way. The other anchor is that besides the penciled lines, all of the marks that get placed on the paper are put there via a potato. I use the smooth face of cut russet potatoes to place acrylic paint on paper, typically after making an impression in the paint from textured fabric or a dried leaf or flower or discarded bits of paper or cardboard. This is essentially a transfer process wherein the ghost image of the thing I’m printing from is transferred to the paper.
Lines that don’t conform to the grid, like curves or diagonals, are made with paper stencils to mask edges. Most of the time I cut simple squares and rectangles to specific measurements from a potato and use it (or its cousins once it has degraded too much to use) to make several hundred passes. I typically layer the stamped shapes to create a sense of depth and to play with the ways colors behave when they are over or under one another. Sometimes, though, it feels important that each little shape get to be its own thing. Again, it just depends.
art resume
group exhibitions
| 2019 | Pacific Northwest Fine Arts @ Phinney Community Center, Seattle, WA (juried) |
| 2018 | Pacific Northwest Fine Arts @ Phinney Community Center, Seattle, WA (juried) |
| 2017 | Modern Touch at the Lynn Hanson Gallery, Seattle, WA |
| 2016 | Phinney Community Center Arts Program, Seattle, WA (2 person show; juried) |
| 2015 | Bellevue Corporate Offices curated by Doris Mosler, Bellevue, WA Maker’s Mark ~ Painters Under Pressure Salon Show, Virginia Inn, Seattle, WA |
| 2013 | Time ~ Ida Culver House, Seattle, WA (juried) Painters Under Pressure Salon Show ~ Phinney Community Center, Seattle, WA Northwest Fine Arts Competition ~ Phinney Community Center, Seattle, WA (juried) |
| 2011 | Avanti Art Gallery, Greenwood Art Walk, Seattle, WA |
| 2008 | Local Color, Seattle, WA |
| 2007 | Salons at the Saloon ~ Collins Pub/Seattle Print Arts, Seattle, WA |
| Local Color, Seattle, WA | |
| 2006 | BallardWorks, ~ BallardWorks ARTwalk, Seattle, WA |
| 2005 | Painters Under Pressure ~ John Page Gallery, Seattle, WA |
solo exhibitions
| 2023 | Holding Space ~ CORE Gallery, Seattle WA |
| 2022 | DownStream ~ CORE Gallery, Seattle WA |
| 2021 | Whatever’s Next, Let’s Make It Good ~ CORE Gallery, Seattle WA |
| 2020 | Declarations of Love ~ CORE Gallery, Seattle WA |
| 2019 | both, and ~ CORE Gallery, Seattle WA |
| 2014 | give us this day ~ Plymouth Church, Seattle, WA |
| 2014 | On and About Time ~ Brotman Galleria (juried), University of Washington, Seattle, WA |
| 2009 | Time Again ~ University Unitarian Church (juried), Seattle, WA |
| 2006 | Another Time ~ Barking Dog, Seattle, WA |
| 2003 | Some Time ~ Cloud City Coffee, Seattle, WA |
education
| 1985 | Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA ~ B.A. Psychology & Women’s Studies |
| 1999 | University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM ~ PhD Clinical Psychology |
| 2005–2015 | Monthly art critique with Painters Under Pressure Salon, Seattle, WA |