Born and raised in Southern California, I moved to the East Coast at age 22 to pursue my graduate degree in Painting at MICA in Baltimore, Maryland. In my weekend travels with my husband Stephen, we stumbled onto the Hudson Valley region of New York in 1990 and it was love at first sight.
I had always been a non objective abstract painter, but in recent years the Hudson landscape has grabbed my attention. For the better part of two years I've been working with paint embedded in layers of resin, yet still applying that abstract sensibility to these Hudson River Landscapes. I have a love for textures and rich patinas which add a dimension of age and variation in the surface of my pieces that evoke the past, the present and moments to come.
While the landscape may be a new genre for me, the use of heavily textured surfaces, transparent and solid layering and a painterly style are a continuation of a past style of work into this new imagery.
My work can be found in numerous public corporations and private institutions mostly in California and Maryland. My husband and I and our two young daughters now call Putnam County, NY home. It’s a visually and historically rich area which promises to continue to fuel the imagery and interplay of light I use to inspire my paintings.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT::
The play of light seen behind a transparent surface is a theme that runs through all of my work over the last 20 years, whether abstract or more representational.
The landscape is ever changing either by nature, time or man. It’s never static. Part meditative, my paintings are as much about that transformation, evolution and juxtaposition as they are about finding small moments of pure peace and beauty. It’s all around us, but most of the time it’s hidden behind the distraction of man-made visual noise.
I am equally influenced by the work of Hudson River School of Art painter's Thomas Cole and Frederick Church on the one hand and on the other, modern painter's like Mark Rothko and his zen like color fields and Jackson Pollack 's action paintings. Even though my paintings don't look like anything any of these artists paint, their spirit infuses my subject matter and imagery.
I take the love and history for the Hudson region from Cole and Church. The vibration of color on color from Rothko and the planned yet seemingly random action dripping of paint from Pollack and extend that to layers of paint, resin and wax as well.
For the last two years I've been working with layers of poured resin, embedding paint in these multiple layers and gluing boxes within the canvas which adds a dimensionality to my work. Each layer beneath is closer to the past. In a sense, the paintings are a sort of reversed archaeology, layer upon layer covering past brush strokes. I also use interference paint which adds atmosphere and causes light diffraction. As a result, the colors change with the movement of your head. There is a lot of movement in my paintings as a result of deep layering, transparent and solid layers as well as light diffraction.
Many of the titles for this series come from sailors’ shanties and old Dutch and regional tales from all along the Hudson River. You can still find places in the Hudson Valley where the view is unchanged from those of the Hudson River School of Art of past centuries. I like to think that I’m one of many carrying on the tradition, but on my own terms and with my own particular take.
