Artist Statement

Making art and feeling the force of language has been an irrepressible part of my life since childhood. I work in a variety of mediums and forms, including drawing, painting and stitching on paper and canvas—mixing media and incorporating language in my artwork.

Always it‘s the sensate experience of engaging with the materials to express ideas of beauty and memory, permanence and impermanence, the universal and the personal. The bare bones of drawing and words are the foundations I build on, as well as the unconventional use of materials such as gesso, shellac, charcoal and thread. Often my goal is discovery, to surprise myself by making something I’ve never seen before.

The complex nature of books as objects is in my bones. I am drawn to their container-like quality, their layered sequential revelation, and their ability to both reveal and conceal. I like the intimacy of books requiring one’s time and touch. Books still occupy an iconic position in our culture; I have a mystical concept of the book and the body as a unity: the book is the word, the word is the voice, the voice is the body, the body is the book.

My influences include: Gertrude Stein—word play just beyond comprehension; Marcel Duchamp, for redefining art; Joseph Cornell, for the constructed drama in miniature; Henri Matisse, for color, pattern, sensuality; Milton Avery, for form, color, modernism; Piero Della Francesca, for beauty, proportion and narrative; and Mark Rothko, for profound lessons in color and spirit.

I’ve been making art, teaching and exhibiting for over thirty years in this country and abroad. I live in Berkeley, California and spend the summers in Taos, New Mexico.