About the Artist

Art has always been a part of my landscape ever since I was a child.  I first fell in love with fine art during a trip to Washington DC and New York when I was 16 with my Mom.  The bold colors and organic shapes created by Henri Matisse had a lasting impression.  I was swept up by the way Georgia O'keeffe  portrayed emotion and movement in her abstract art.  Picasso was a jack of all trades, much like myself.  And Salvador Dali's surrealist paintings had so many layers of meaning, I could talk for hours about one.

It wasn't until I took a ceramics class the summer after my freshman year in college, did I ever consider making art myself.  I loved working with the clay...getting dirty and manipulating a material into a form was exciting to me.  The camaraderie amongst artists was supportive, yet challenged me to think outside of the box. Being around all of that creativity was infectious, stimulating ideas in the form of art.  After four years of taking ceramics, jewelry metalsmithing, sculpture, printmaking, painting, and computer art, I graduated with a BFA in Ceramic Sculpture.

I then took a break from making art for nine years to raise our two sons and lead the life of a military spouse.  The local community college at our Pensacola, FL duty station had a new program for teachers to be certified.  It took a year of night classes, but I graduated with an Art K-12 teaching certification.  At the same time my husband was on a six month military deployment and I had just recently lost my father.  Both of their absences was taking its toll and I was struggling to cope.  So I bought myself some oil pastels and drawing paper and started to draw.  Sheets and sheets of paper were quickly filled with bold colors, various lines, organic shapes, and variety in texture.  I was able to channel my energy into art and felt so much better once I did.

After five years of living in Jacksonville, FL and a six month teaching gig for middle school art, we moved to Anacortes, WA in 2012.  There I was encouraged by a mentor to start making art again.  I found acrylic paints, wooden panels, and resin to experiment with.  Color was my shining star.  Concurrently, I found an online masters in education program from Stephens College in Columbia, Mo. It was during this time that I started to understand the kind of teacher I was and what I wanted to become.  I found my confidence and channeled it through my art and teaching. 

The summer of 2017 I was hired to be the high school Ceramics and Sculpture teacher.  It was a dream come true kind of job for me.  It felt like being a rockstar, only at a small town level.  Everyone knew me or knew of me.  I have a way of pushing the limits but under the radar which made me a magnet for everyone. 

However, each year I taught, the harder it was to keep it together on all levels.  I was kicking ass at teaching, but I was personally drowning.  Five years into teaching, at the age of 48, I was diagnosed with Bipolar II and had to go on medical leave while I figured my shit out. It broke my heart to resign from my position.  The stress of teaching was too much for me to handle.  So my husband started looking for jobs around the country.  One day we were at a change of command ceremony for a good friend of ours when we came upon a job flier for engineers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.  It also happened to be near Espanola where I spent the first 5 years of my life. 

Long story short, it took us 6 months to execute our plan once we envisioned it.  Now we live in the country in Espanola, NM (North Central NM) where the sun shines 90% of the time and part of a community rich in culture and diversity. Unknowingly, we bought a house only a few streets away from where I lived as a child.   My days are quieter now.  Routines have become rituals.  I spend every morning outside on my front porch drinking coffee, watching the sun rise, reading the newspaper, and watching my dog snuffling around in the leaves.  We have a pair of magpies building a nest in our front tree.  It is a good life here.  Different from anywhere else we've lived.  And the Wild West description could easily apply.  But I love everything about it nonetheless.

 And so my story continues....