As a young child, I spent many hours exploring our Maryland farm surrounded by a variety of land formations, indigenous flora and agricultural crops, and both domestic and wild animals. I followed an active rural childhood of drawing and painting nature with a formal education in both Art and Biology.

In graduate school, I focused on fine art and as a 21st century artist, I do not see myself as limited to one type of media. For me the aesthetic concept drives the form that the artwork will take. Though predominantly a mixed-media painter, I have often worked in created watercolor, printmaking, assemblage, installation, and performance art.

Though the influence of my early rural life still pervades much of my artwork, the many artists and artworks that I have encountered throughout my academic career have proven a tremendous influence. Artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Kathe Kollwitz, Lorna Simpson, Emile Nolde, Vincent Van Gogh, Agnes Denes, Oscar Kokoschka, Joseph Beuys and Sue Coe constantly influenced my work.

Though the form and content of my imagery is illuminated by an art historical education, it is the more than twenty years of addressing the classroom questions of the student-viewer that have taught me what the spectator is actually perceiving. My own students’ perceptive observations have made me a much stronger artist.

Together with the natural content of my work, my own life experience and my imagined poetic myth have proven integral in my exploration of the human condition. A range of representation is evident in the various series of works that I have produced. My content ranges through the visual weight of realistic foxes, the illusive structure of gathering tornadoes, and the translucent abstractions of my own mythological creation – the “Rainbow Birds Series”. Formally, the essential elements of color and space often release the tension of charged subject matter into a deeply recessive negative space. Through painterly brushwork and intense value contrast, my mixed-media works reveal the subtle meaning and formal dexterity possible with color, a complex system of movement and deeply recessive space. Inspired by natural phenomena, my artworks assert attributes such as strength, transition, and renewal, while often exploring the themes of life, death and resurrection.