2022 to March 2023
collages & little paintings flowed out of me . pure joy to make.
for the first time in a life of making things, I loved my work & wanted to show these paintings, ideally all together as a unit.
a dear friend seeing them for the first time, laid out on the floor, said, "oh, I didn't know you were a surrealist!"

nor did I, but it rang true though my dreams are smaller, more intimate than some.a Jane Austen of the style once so dominated by men? (apologies to Carrington, Varos & a few other bold women!)

then, last summer I got a brain infection. spent a long time in hospital, and a longer time focused on recovery.
when I finally returned to the studio, I was delighted to find I still care about this body of work, and have the desire to put it into the world.
voila!

January 2020
After year of telling a little story of pain and healing through a set of collages, it's time for a RESET.
Not sure where the next pieces will take me, but I'm ready for the journey!


January 2019
A lot of my 2018 was devoted to ardently loving and ultimately losing.
An amazing experience that I'm grateful to have had, and the grief
I'm feeling is manifesting in myriad ideas for work coming straight from
my heart.


March 2018
since last Fall i've been working on a series of large drawings called
Once Upon A Time In Iowa, based on photos taken by Mary Tiegreen and on many happy memories.
I'll be posting them in Artwork, but the sheen of graphite make them hard to shoot so it way be a while.
* 2023 & I still haven't got good photos of these, alas.

May 2017
i spent several months in 2016 & 2017 making nichos, creating little tin worlds to embody some of the themes that obsess me~gardens, our place in the world, flight, the night~i sold some without shooting them, but the ones on this site are a good representation of the whole.
i made some more collages that year too. that technique lets me explore more favorite themes~paradise,home,belief, falling, hope...
this year has been all about drawing with graphite, trying to stretch myself and get looser within the narrative land where i live.


June 2015
at the end of 2014 i was feeling unfocused, and after a long [boring!] internal debate, decided i want to tell more little stories and see if any call out to be painted. staying with one size-8X10"-feels right for now.

May 2014
The Little Stories collages continue to evolve.
This year I am exploring what removing all color as well as the words that were the genesis of this project, and going much larger, does to these narrative compositions.
I have also been very inspired by the work of Jim Waid which I saw for the first time this year [thanks to Joe Hatton, another wonderful Tucson artist].
The combination of energy & lyricism had a strong & lasting impact on me, and Joe's offhand comment about marks on canvas sparked a desire to engage the surface of my drawings-erasing, smearing. digging in-in a way i had not done for years.
Some of the collages have particularly strong compositions, easily translatable to other media, and have ready-made subject matter is allowing me a lot of freedom to just go at it and see what happens.

October 2013:
This year has been about process...making 8X10" narrative collages starting with intriguing words and phrases clipped from magazines & trying to build "Little Stories" around them from the thousands of images from the same sources.
I've been surprised and delighted by the range of interpretations from different viewers, and I began to wonder what would happen if I translated the collages into oil paintings of the same [roughly page] size;
removing the words and trying to bring the found elements into a new
kind of harmony.

Would any hold up as purely image? Would they still be stories, and, if so, would they be the same ones?

These collages & paintings are in the Current Work/2013 folder...I would love to hear your thoughts.

Older work is in other folders; input on those is also welcome.

Many thanks to Beyond Design for sharing their beautiful space with artists at the Ravenswood Art Walk, and to everyone who came to see my work there.
The lively conversations; insightful, surprising, and occasionally hilarious comments; warm responses & encouragement gave me great joy and lots of ideas for the next phase of work.