May 23, STILL cold and raining. 5 days now. I have been working, reworking some of my early abstractions from last year. They have gotten so much better... Kind of surprising how much one can keep learning even when one gets older. I am working from my heart, and it's easier now, more direct, than when I had a lot of ideas and worries about it all!!
My studio is in an old elementary school, 801 North Lincoln Drive in Hancock. I love visitors! I am usually there but please call first: 906-370-3183. My hours are erratic.
Locally my work is at the Ziyad Gallery, the Art Center, and in my studio for viewing. In Madison I am still at the Grace Chosy Gallery, and in Petoskey at the Crooked Tree, and now in Ironwood at the Z Place.
Artist Statement
My work reflects my surroundings, here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The particular kind of north woods landscape, its trees, rocks, lake, waterfalls, animals are what imprinted me as a child and to which I came back in 1998, looking for that which felt like home.
I was trained as an abstract expressionist painter in graduate school. This grounding has carried me through a lifetime of finally working with imagery. Shapes and negative spaces form the skeleton which holds the meanings, both articulate and inarticulate, of my expression. Now I am back to my origins in working abstractly again, with watercolor on color pencil.
I will probably also continue to paint birch trees, symbol and metaphor for our relationship to that spirit underlying nature. And animals continue to appear in my work in various guises. One recent direction had to do with the animals of the Kalevala, the old Finnish epic. The beauty and mystery of its images are haunting. Why does the gray dog keep barking?
But currently my obsession is with abstraction, evolving from years of imagery, both symbolic and descriptive. I need to get beyond the surface of things and deeper into that which holds us all together. Maybe it's my getting older that coincides with a kind of spiritual longing making its appearance in my drawings. Still new, I am watching to see where it takes me.
