biography

My first serious art project was a 2nd grade mural of a farm scene, created with my best friend Ann, and I've never forgotten the excitement and awe of seeing it come together into a completed piece.  Later I fell in love with creating ceramic work in high school.  Then life took me in other directions for a number of years.  As a parent, trying to encourage a reluctant child to take an art class at the local Arts Center, I realized it was my own wish to make art that was the impetus for the conversation, and since then I've never looked back.

For a number of years after that I pursued handbuilding in clay with great satisfaction, experimenting with numerous forms, clay bodies, glazes, and ways of decorating the surface of a piece.  I saved my failures for the mosaic I planned to make, which I finally started after a workshop with the fabulous Isaiah Zagar of Philadelphia.  

Working in clay I found myself torn between the pleasure of creating freely, and the technical requirements of constructing a piece that wouldn't collapse in the high temperatures of the kiln.  That I loved most to work with the thinnest of porcelain only added to the dilemma.  When I decided to pursue some technical classes, I found to my chagrin that the constant stream of images that for years had flowed freely through my mind completely dried up when I was doing assignments designed to improve my technical ability.  I ended up having to take a two-year break from art altogether to see if my creativity could renew itself.  

Ultimately I found that I had to move into an entirely new arena to restore my ability to close my eyes and to once again see images of the things I wanted to play with making.  I was fortunate to remember that one of my clay instructors had observed that I was more like a painter than a potter when I decorated the surfaces of my clay pieces, and even more fortunate that mixed media artist extraordinaire Nancy Barch teaches locally.  In the fall of 2011 I took my first mixed media class and haven't stopped since.  Though I had a brief foray into thinking I needed some drawing instruction, I was quickly reminded what technical instruction had done to me the last time, and came to my senses.