I consider the great challenge of life to be finding a skillful balance between the inherent and the malleable, the given and the spontaneous. Creativity is the loom that allows us to weave these opposites into a life that is uniquely our own. My paintings explore the binary of order and chaos that exist in nature as well as in the human experience. Philosopher John O’Donohue describes “destiny” as given structures, and I have worked to investigate how this structure gives rise to creativity in the physical and aesthetic realm. As a dynamic, the ratio between the two is constantly shifting – sometimes chaos takes over, as in an earthquake or cyclone, and sometimes order prevails, as in the steady growth of a forest after a wildfire. My work follows this ever-changing relationship, and reflects my own need for either greater structure or freedom at a particular moment.

For several years I painted in the Plein-Air style, and I investigated how nature orchestrates rigid solid forms alongside the ephemeral chaos of climate and atmosphere. In the northern California, this dynamic was constantly visible. For instance, fog lifting over a mountainside in Marin possesses at once the mass of a solid thing and intangible weightlessness. Prior to these landscapes, I developed a painting practice that explored pattern. I was drawn to the meditative quality of this work, rhythmically laying down pattern to create a harmonious, satisfying repetition of form. Once I developed the guidelines of the pattern, the process was straightforward and clear, as in solving a math equation. Soon these two veins of work merged and my paintings searched for balance while weaving together contrasting layers of pattern and organic forms. The repeating pattern represents the inherent rules of physics to which we are all subject, while the superimposed image of a landscape, city, portrait, or abstract form expresses the spontaneity and plasticity of life. As in John O’Donohue’s quote above, I begin with structure, and then break this structure open through organic forms and images. Throughout the painting process, I push and pull the pattern from foreground to background, aiming for a harmonious balance of structure and freedom.

French Surrealist poet Paul Eluard stated, “there is another world – but it is inside this one”. As the daughter of a quilter and a chemist specializing in crystallography, I am fascinated by the structures, often very beautiful, underlying what is visible to our eyes. During a walk in Vermont winter, I was captivated by a pine branch with new spring growth punctuating the tips of each branch. The image spoke of a hidden structure; an imagined network of cells and DNA orchestrating this brilliant, but spontaneous, achievement. Working with a pattern in dark tones, I highlighted this outburst of spring by placing an organic image of a branch in the foreground, after building a pattern underneath in Vermont in March. A tendril of the pattern pulls forward as a reminder that what we see and the hidden structures underneath are actually not separate - rather, this is a world within a world. “A Bee’s Dream” further investigates the structure and geometry of nature. In this painting, a hexagonal honeycomb pattern is laced with the image of a blooming apple tree. The architecture of the bee’s creation enables the tree to blossom into an array of abundance.

Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where landscape and human constructions are interwoven in a beautiful tapestry, I explored cityscapes as well as landscapes. I examined how humans work with the inherent rules of physics to create structures within which to live. In these structures, in this case, the tightly-packed urban environment of San Francisco, humans work to live creatively. To take a simple example of structure enabling freedom, the orderly system of traffic laws enable cars to move freely through city streets. In “Divisadero Street,” buildings march downhill like ants along the straight city street. The strict lines of the urban environment bloom into a playful, flower-like display through the pattern. This juxtaposition between urban structure and fluidity inspired me to create several cityscape paintings in the Bay Area. I have explored other urban environments, including my new hometown of Boise.

Currently, I am working with the human figure, using the architecture of the human body to delineate the dynamic between form and pattern. In “Ode to the Kiss,” the soft forms of Rodin’s expressive sculpture are juxtaposed with a high contrast pattern, creating a tapestry of fluidity, angularity, shadow, and light. In another vein of current work, I am using encaustic paint to explore the dynamic between rigidity and plasticity. This new body of work reduces my previous kaleidoscopic patterns down to a simplified juxtaposition of structure and play. In “Line and Form I” and “Line and Form II,” a foundational layer of paint is scored in a triangular grid. The scored lines are filled with a contrasting color, and layers are applied across the whole panel, covering the grid. In final process, the top layers are are polished to reveal amorphous forms and to excavate the grid hidden beneath. This process of reduction was inspired by studying the work of Piet Mondrian, an artist who’s work led him from naturalistic imagery to simple geometric lines and shapes. I have also been inspired by several other artists whose work has journeyed towards reduction and extraction of essentials, particularly Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Georgia O’Keefe.




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