ABOUT THE ARTIST
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When I was 10, I was enrolled in oil painting classes at the local museum school. I was very inquisitive, bringing home all manner of strange or pretty objects that delighted me in some way. My prized dead woodpecker was culled early on. I never stopped learning or adding to my study collection. Their shapes, forms, and colors appear in my paintings and sculptures. My concern for the environment shows up frequently in my images of the earth as a living human. Part of this life long learning is my curiosity about history, spirituality, and how we, as different groups of people, express ourselves in our ways of life, our clothing, food, stories, and cosmology.
As an educator I have taught a full range of mediums, including oils, acrylics, clay, printmaking, paper mache and stone carving. I've taught in public and private schools, and extensively in community outreach and in a large facility for aged veterans.
Several murals, both painted and 3-D were created under my direction by participants in community outreach. A favorite project involved kids in a family shelter, creating a 3 D scene of our city. We used insulating board to keep it lightweight and cut forms to make the buildings. The hydraulic low rider cars we had seen in a parade the previous week, were now flying over the high rises, and the Hudson River was full of boats, fish and sharks, (who knew?). Another standout was an elementary school hallway turned into an underwater sea scape full of paper seaweed, fish, jellyfish, and sharks. Lots of sharks. One even had a paper leg in its mouth!
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