For many years I’ve worked almost entirely in landscape, seduced by the interaction of land, water, and light. My deep love of wilderness was kindled by travels with my late husband, an avid hiker and backpacker, and our two sons.  

 

My work is specific to place: I hike and climb there, in locations as disparate as the Red River Gorge in my native Kentucky, the dramatic coasts of Cape Breton-Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland, the majestic intimacy of Quebec’s Gaspesie, the endlessly beautiful Everglades, Vancouver Island, and many years exploring coastal Maine. More recently I discovered the sublime Oregon coast. 

 

I explore space in my drawings – negative space, how it pushes up against, and how it reaches deep. Surface is important to me, and the calm shapes land and water make: the dark swell and curve of a mountain, the hard pull of shadow and stone, the distant undulation of a watery horizon, a river’s meandering sway. These images invade and inhabit me, as the work hovers and dips between realism and abstraction.

 

I love oil paint for its sensuality, and its dichotomy of muscularity and delicacy. I love charcoal for its immediacy, its responsiveness, and its surprises. I find the thick and thin-able texture of oil stick supremely addictive.  

 

A few years ago, I started to look up, and a Cloud Series is slowly unfolding. Another series in progress embraces the voluptuously vined Trees of Ra’anana. These days I find myself in love with drawing and painting the places I spend the most time: the wetlands and marshes and beaches of New Jersey, and the hypnotic, infinitely changeable Pines Lake, where I now live. My practice has grown to include working not only from the drawings and sketches I make, but also the photographs I take during my looking.  

 

Whether I complete a drawing while sitting on a rock, or later spend hours exploring and surrendering to the beginnings I made, the drawings always evolve. They become their own place.