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 regeneration in nature (in a time of destruction), and the need for nurture, magic and wonder.