All my life I have studied what is underneath. The process of uncovering layers—places that are vibrant, dark, passionate, mysterious, hidden, and utterly luminous—excites me. Throughout my life what has interested me most is seeing the complexity in everyone and everything around me. I focused my thirty-six year psychotherapy practice on excavating truth—understanding and helping others to see what is not immediately visible. As an artist, I work spontaneously on a vigorous but unplanned search for answers, where each layer of color and mark, each moment, each brush stroke informs the next.
Though as a woman and a psychotherapist I have relied on language, I paint from a place without words. Here I speak through my love of color, through the textures of thick, sensuous paint, raw uncovered space, and with the light that emerges through transparent glazes. My palette is informed by what I see in the natural world—the colors of water, light, shadow, rock, erosion, movement, passion, fullness. Using many layers of acrylic paint, graphite, charcoal and other media, I strive to build up a sense of breath and expansion. In layering paint and color into palpable textured areas on the canvas—sometimes thick, sometimes thin—I access deeper and more complex places in myself and in my work. Always present for me is a vigorous pursuit of the balance between intensity and stillness. This is reflected in the juxtaposition between vibrant form and expanded space that is ever present in my paintings.
