ABOUT

I graduated from Scripps College in Claremont, California in 1984 with a BA degree in psychology. I met my husband Eric my senior year. He was a senior at Harvey Mudd College. We got married in 1986 while I was adrift at SDG&E (my second real job) after drifting away from my first real job at the Bank of New England in Boston. Eric was a graduate student in physics at UC San Diego. About a year into our marriage, Eric’s new advisor requested that he (therefore we) move temporarily to the Chicago area in order to continue the work at his lab at Argonne National Lab while his lab at UCSD was being built. Six months became two years and that is where our first child, Thomas, was born in 1988. Anyway, we moved back to San Diego and had our second child, Hannah, at the same time Eric got his PhD in 1991. We were happily living in graduate student apartments and spending lots of time at the beach and reptile house at the Zoo. I was not working at anything but being a mom. Our third child, Zachary, was born in 1997 in San Jose where Eric had landed his second real job when Hannah was starting first grade. I had very little money to play with so I drew and wrote because all I needed was paper and pencil. I loved being a mom at home with her kids. It was a good fit for me. I volunteered at their schools, mostly as the art docent which involved a bit of art history and a complimentary project once a month. I volunteered in school districts in Naperville, Illinois, San Jose, Morgan Hill, and San Diego, California where we live again because Eric is now a professor at UCSD. My art is largely self taught -- mostly through experimentation and play. I began painting in 2008 after a vacation with my family in Kauai. Taking photos of the plants and flowers made me want to paint them so I began working in transparent watercolor after completing a workshop with artist Rikki Reinholz. Years later, in 2019 while I was in deep bereavement following the death of our beloved son Tom, I found Pamela Caughey on YouTube and fell in love with her work and her approach to painting. So I enrolled in her on-line workshop and began working in oil and cold wax medium. I also completed Rebecca Crowell and Jerry McLaughlin's on-line workshop. Currently, my work is focused on nonrepresentational painting in cold wax and oil paint. But I continue to take lots of pictures, and I make collages too which is fun but much

harder than it looks. I experiment with color and texture, and I never know where I'm going until I get there. And that brings me joy and has helped me remain mostly sane through my grief and loss.