I paint things that I love, drawing inspiration from places to which I feel connected. I started painting landscapes as a pathway home to Pennsylvania. My love of the natural world is deeply rooted in my upbringing where I was given a gift of respect and appreciation towards our natural surroundings. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I was raised to be a steward of the land. As a young child, I was fortunate to live on a property that had fields and woods in which to play and explore, and to travel to spectacular places like Montana, where I experienced what true wilderness and open land has to offer. Now, I see these beautiful and wild places diminishing at an alarming rate. My desire to represent these places is borne from my love for them; aiming to capture their fleeting beauty. Painting the places I find beautiful keeps me connected while being so far away.
My artistic journey began when the family barn, a Pennsylvania fieldstone bank barn, built in 1884, burned to the ground within minutes of being struck by lightening. My parents, siblings and I all felt as though a member of our family had died, as the barn had played a significant roll in all of our lives. I was living in Mississippi at the time and after mourning the loss of this marvelous historic structure, I felt an intense need to paint it and the land around it as an homage to my heritage.
My work is mostly created from my photographs yet many pieces are generated from my imagination. These particular pieces have been described as “it could be anywhere” or “generic”. To me, a better word could be “universal” as these paintings are, by chance, a collective of many landscapes married into one. I was born in 1961 in southeastern Pennsylvania and lived there my entire childhood. In 1986, I received a BA in Art History, from Montana State University; and that same year I married and moved south to Hattiesburg, Mississippi where we have since lived and raised our two children. From 2004-2013 I taught elementary art at the school our children attended. My work is represented by Oddfellows Gallery in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and I am an active member of the Women’s Art Collective, in Hattiesburg, and the Mississippi Art Colony, a state wide organization.
My husband and I now divide our time between Mississippi and Montana.
