About Me

artist Statement

My paintings begin with place — real places, felt deeply: the volcanic coastlines of Iceland, the layered light of the Mediterranean, the ancient terrain of lands shaped by myth and time. I travel not to document, but to absorb. What comes back to the canvas is not a record but a reckoning — an abstract landscape charged with memory, color, and emotional truth.

This body of work is rooted in a lifelong engagement with the natural world and with the stories we tell about it. Homer's Odyssey has been a particular companion — not as literary subject matter, but as a frame for thinking about the journey itself: the disorientation, the wonder, the longing for something just beyond the horizon. These paintings live in that space. The landforms are recognizable but unreal. The light is possible but not quite earthly. They invite the viewer to locate themselves somewhere between the known and the mythic.

Working in oil on canvas, I build my landscapes in layers — color pressed against color, form dissolving into atmosphere. The process is intuitive and physical, guided more by feeling than by plan. I am interested in what happens when the familiar world tilts slightly out of reach, when a shoreline becomes a dream, when mountains take on the gravity of something older than geography.

After decades as a painter and community artist in Charlotte, North Carolina, I find myself returning — as Odysseus did — to what has always been there. The landscape was where I started. It is where I am most fully myself.

Abstract Landscapes

The Warrior Figure did not arrive easily. For years, I painted beautiful, safe landscapes — work I enjoyed but that did not fully express who I was or what I believed. When I finally let go of what I thought I should be as an artist, she emerged. She is the result of that liberation — a form that holds strength, vulnerability, and the ongoing negotiation between the two.

She came to me slowly, and then all at once, and she has been present in my work in various ways that sometimes I don’t expect. She’s my champion, my advisor, my constant companion.