"Starting in college, I painted the landscape around me — seriously and full time — learning the discipline and commitment required to constantly improve my technical skills and formulate my ideas. 

 

I taught painting and drawing at Syracuse University and the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and I was fortunate enough to teach abroad in Florence and London and travel extensively. My influences are varied from music and how it's built, patterns and ornament, religion — both culturally and spiritually, the beauty of a pencil drawing by Van Eyck, religious architecture and so much more. 

 

As a young artist, my work was based on my interior world and my ideas for paintings were based on feminism and what it is to be a woman in Catholicism. I explored these ideas in painting and installation work. Eventually, I returned to the landscape, looking outward and responding to the beauty around me: the changing light and color, the way shapes collide or flow into one another, and the scale of myself to the landscape. 

 

I take photos and then go to the studio and start a dozen paintings, trying to find the 'thing' that made me pull over on the side of the road. Then the work germinates. I work on them until I can’t or don’t know what to do next. I take lots of notes and make multiple drawings in case I forget an idea, and then I tape it to the painting as a road map for the future. 

 

I find I repeat the same themes. Sometimes, they’re design-oriented and formal — shapes, contrast, perspective, or how to create an illusion. Other times it’s a sense of the whole: a feeling, the wonder and intimacy of being in a certain place at a certain time — a sunset, a mowed field, cows on a hill. But it’s difficult to describe exactly what draws me to a place; I suppose that’s the whole reason for painting — traveling through the painting and looking for the reason I started it in the first place. Through that process, I know I’ll find something that keeps me painting. I’m always surprised how it works and what I find. 

 

I live in southeastern Pennsylvania surrounded by farms where there is a lifetime's worth of ideas and images to paint, all within a few miles of my home."