While most people are busy looking down at their phones, I like looking up.  The sky is vast, ever-changing and beautiful.  It continually puts things in perspective for me.  It never repeats itself, it has different moods and is different from day to day and from moment to moment.  It is just like our own experience with living.

In these paintings, I seek to capture the changing skies and weather we experience at the beach.  The clouds can move quickly and change from one moment to the next.  This makes an interesting challenge to capture the sense of the day during the painting process.    

I often wondered what peoples’ reactions would be if my work was hanging in a museum.  So I made diorama constructs, imagining what peoples’ responses would be to my work.  For this series I painted on smaller canvasses (i.e., 3” x 3”, 4” x 4”) as opposed to the larger canvasses that I have typically painted on (i.e., 3’ x 5’).  I’ve sometimes used snippets of actual conversations overhead in a museum setting to inspire a piece.  My “Museum Series”constructs are either 7” x 7” or 7” x 14”.  These smaller sizes are reminiscent of peephole dioramas found in some museums.

Overhearing what people say and how they respond to abstract paintings in a museum is sometimes fascinating and sometimes funny.  This series is in response to my hearing these conversations in different museums.  All of the Museum Series dioramas in this section are 7” x 7”.

I enjoy painting so much I remember mixing colors in kindergarten and being excited at all the colors I could create on paper.  Today I still paint blank paper as a thinking respite; it’s my doodling.  After collecting quite a few of these painted papers, I decided why not collage with them!  This series grew from finding the shapes and compositions in the papers that told a story for me.

I’ve always liked Victorian magazine illustrations, so I began including them in my painted paper collages. These royalty free illustrations helped me visually bring to life platitudes that we hear too often in normal conversation.  

Sometimes my mind gets going and I can’t stop thinking “what about trying this, what about trying that, is it going to work at all, is it a good idea?” And there’s no way to find out except by trying it. This series is about different well-known artists visiting Maryland, what it might look like and how I could represent that.  

Tablescapes are traditionally still life objects on a tabletop.  I wondered “But what if those objects were in motion?”  I began by creating motion around the objects, then the objects themselves became the movement in the composition.  Although seemingly tethered to the tabletop, the objects appear to have a life of their own, falling and moving across the tabletop.

When the weather is changing or a storm is gathering, farm fields can sometimes look yellow, and tilled fields can look graphic.  Working in oil, I’ve tried to capture these moments.

So often we don’t pay attention to the sky as we go about our day, we take it for granted, and it’s always there, so I set out to paint a sky picture every day to remind myself of the variety that can be found in this world. 

I enjoy my garden and how it changes through the seasons.  I started making painted paper sculptural collages to express the fullness of the garden; I felt it had to be 3-D.  I want the reliefs to feel like they are bursting from the frame, even in winter and early spring when browned grasses and pink petals fall to the ground.  I find as much variety in my garden through the seasons as I do looking at the changing sky.  All works in this section are 10” x 10”.