is an Orange County, California based artist --- When I first began to paint seriously my preferred medium was watercolor. I was attracted to the liquid light and color offered by that medium, and over a period of three years I produced about ten large works representing everything from my domestic world to city- and landscapes. Over the past two years, however I have become increasingly interested in working with oils and acrylic. I have found that oils and acrylic, done on canvas rather than on paper, can produce works of deeper color tones, allowing work with more contrast, emphasizing a wider range of emotion, especially somber effects, and allowing me also to explore new subjects, such as fantasy. I’m certainly not turning away from continuing to work with watercolor, but I find that oil and acrylic have opened me, both technically and imaginatively, to a new range of subjects and emotional effects. I have recently taken figure drawing classes, and that experience has opened my eyes to the central importance in mastering representation of drawing and the human figure.
I completed a course in jewelry making, something totally different, of course, from representational and figural art, but which taught me much about working in a new medium, in this case metal and stones, emphasizing a new set of non-representational effects.
My recent work comes from an expression deep within me, one that makes me feel insane, pained and happiness, altogether. Almost like an infectious never ending black hole. Which brings me to Time, and holding onto it or trying to get away from it. The size of my work is always large, because it needs to be heard. When working in oil and acrylic I often choose a black background to silence its size or show darkness. Against that background I use vivid colors. My intention is to have this contrast to signify the pouring of any and all emotions. The series on which I am currently working is mainly made in acrylic and sometimes mixed media. The mixed media in the paintings can range from glitter to paper. Recently, paper quilling has been an experiment that has worked well for me in several pieces. I use it to show delicacy and feminism. My current series focuses on the fantasy of a beautiful woman who wears a top hat, and whose body language and posture expresses over flowing emotions. I derived the top hat from the famous author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where it is worn by the Mad Hatter. The famous story’s character is known to be “Mad,” and that is something I relate to and strive to bring that into my work. Obviously, as you can tell, I sometimes feel that my mind is my greatest fear. After all, the mind can manipulate you in ways that are unimaginable. This is the reason why I transcribe significance of life and death into some of the pieces. When I ended the series, I knew it was a satisfying conclusion because of how it all came together. In my image the fantasy of the beautiful woman, represented against the beauty of darkness, is intended to show that she finally breaks away from the harmful manipulation of her mind and from the pull of Time holding her in the past. In other words, my intention in this series is to show psychological liberation.