I was raised in an Indiana auto- manufacturing town, delivered by a creek of wonders, married at 17, and moved to Texas. My first job was working midnights as a switchboard and radio operator to the remote, mysterious oil fields. My creative work has taken many forms but returns to this familiar intersection of nature, technology and fantasy.

 

    I attended Indiana University to study painting, and tag-teaming schooling with my husband, received my MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. There I studied landscape painting with Neil Welliver, a fierce teacher who taught me love of modernist form but who discouraged focus on content in realist  painting. However, trained in realism yet unsatisfied with painting  singular and content void “windows into the world” I began experimenting with new compositional structures to enhance possibilities for content, and  integrated collage that offered contextual challenges and surprises. My  first collage book was made to express environmental and cultural portents  of disaster for which I mined my children’s drawings and old science books for anecdotal content. I continue to call upon such unintentional  collaborators, a surrealist tactic. My new work explores the unique character of place and natural processes in my search to find wonder in daily life. 

      I am an Assistant Professor of Art at DePauw University and at Indiana State University in their Corrections Education Program.  I  also continue to substitute teach in an elementary school classroom for the developmentally disabled.  My prior experience includes serving as the Executive Director for the local Humane Society, summer employment as Interpretor at Lieber State Recreation Center, and directing the design and painting of murals for the Philadelphia Mural Project.