I am the youngest of six daughters, born to parents who were passionate academicians and world travelers. By the age of 10, I had lived in the Philippines and Canada and had traveled extensively through Europe and Southeast Asia.

As the youngest, I rarely joined in the conversation with my parents and siblings (I couldn't get a word in edgewise with five older sisters). Instead, I chose to remain in the audience, feeling a little detached from the action of the actors on stage, yet absolutely riveted by the drama unfolding around me. I suppose I have always been keenly aware that I am the "spectator." And as a result, the motif of people watching, observing, often surveilling, has repeatedly found its way into my paintings. I am a story teller as who employs my family members and friends as muses, a sensibility that I owe to my brilliant writer mother.

I have also been profoundly impacted by the rich experiences resultant from traveling extensively at a very young age. My wonderfully intense father, a professor of metallurgy, would carefully plot out intricate travel itineraries to include all the major monuments and museums of each country we visited around the world. (I saw many of the major museums of France, Italy, Germany, and England before the age of ten.) As a result, I fell in love with painting.... Wandering from one masterpiece to the next, filling my eyes and sensibilities to overflowing.

Taking my cue from the Dutch masters, I sought familiar, mundane objects and cast them in new ways...giving them their moment on stage and inviting a closer inspection. I purposefully threw a dramatic light source on them to see what magic might happen with reflections, transparencies and cast shadows. I adore painting highly reflective, transparent objects and enjoy the level of problem solving analysis required to convey optical illusion as reality.

I am equally intrigued with incorporating an implied narrative within my work; like half told story imbued with mystery....a moment of portent, the quiet hush before a storm. The influences of film noir and photography figure prominently in my process and my imagery.  Working figuratively can be a complicated matter.  I have found that the observer is sometimes pre-conditioned to react in a certain way: does this piece tell a story, are these people that I recognize, is this a specific moment in time? What are they thinking? What are they saying? Many viewers experience a piece, make a quick “closure” decision and move on, as if thumbing through a book and then slamming the cover closed…finding nothing there to pull them into a level deeper than mere visual recognition.   My intention is to keep that book from slamming closed.

For me, the human figure encompasses an intriguing and unsettling balance between chaos and control through the constant fluctuation of expression, movement and time. Working figuratively triggers my memories, impressions, emotions and dreams; allowing me to explore and uncover facets of myself.  Sometimes I feel like an archeologist, slowly and painstakingly polling back one layer of dirt at a time to see what might be hidden underneath.

I suppose that I owe my dual sensibilities; a complex combination of analytical investigation with the propensity for story telling, to my genetic wiring. After all, I am my parents' daughter.