Welcome

I have been drawing and painting since I was five years old. In grade school my art teacher gave me a large book with amazing photos of art on classical artists which included Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Titian and da Vinci to encourage me to try more complicated work. The drawings and paintings I copied fueled my desire to be a working artist. When I was twelve I discovered a book of Japanese woodcut prints my grandmother had in her large library. This began my fascination with Japanese art and culture, and forming my ideas about line and color. It was through the study of Japanese art that led me to discover Impressionism. I grew up in a large university town that allowed access to its libraries. There I found books on the impressionist artists, especially Renoir, Monet, Seurat, Cezanne, Morisot and Manet, but my favorite was two American impressionists, Frank Weston Benson and Edmund Tarbell . I copied their work extensively, learning their method and color palettes.

At sixteen I discovered another art form that was to be my career for thirty-five years — classical ballet. During the first twenty of those years I continued with my visual arts, especially in the summers when we were on layoff. On an average I completed twenty to thirty works a year, mostly in the impressionist style, interspersed with forays into cubism and French expressionism. During this time I never looked for my own style or a particular subject matter, nor did I do shows or seek representation, I was just interested in learning the technique of many different masters.

When I retired as a professional dancer, I took a year to explore the possibility of returning to the visual arts as a career, but another opportunity came to me as an artistic director and choreographer. Not long after this, I bought my first computer with a high end graphics monitor and a wacom tablet. For the next 15 years the computer absorbed all my visual arts urges. It was easier to work on my drawing skills with the computer, as my duties as artistic director absorbed most of my life with very little down time. After retiring from my last position as Artistic Director of a professional ballet company, my enthusiasm for the PC as an art medium waned and I found myself drawn back to the tactile feel of brush and paint. I began to work exclusively in encaustics, and, as I was living in India at the time, I was inspired by the luminosity of ancient wax paintings. Eventually I returned to oils, but what I took away from my encaustic work dramatically changed my work in oils: canvas mounted on a wood panel for a sturdy support, using a hand muller to make my own paint to control texture and the heavy "butter-i-ness" I sought in the medium, and extensive use of the palette knife.

At this time, I am exploring another step in my ever growing need for plasticity in my work: base-relief sculpture cast in hand made paper, then painted in oil. (See my construction process here: Construction Process. At this time my greatest concern is the colorization of the sculpted paper. I may come to the point of casting the sculpture in bronze and would relieve me of the need for colorization (other than the use of patinas).

Harbor Engagement