I am an artist from Highland Park, IL. My studio practice focuses on biographical aspects of life — circumstantial and influential moments in time -- that provide an expanded sense of portraiture. Emotional, meaningful moments inspire and inform my creative interests.
My multi-disciplinary studio practice combines painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking with subjects in human or animal form. Each work has a narrative “back story” behind it. The experience of learning, fear, loss, and joy are central to my work. Focusing on an expanded view of portraiture, I strive to incorporate the intrinsic and extrinsic connections that influence an individual being’s experience and memory.
I use photography in a multi-disciplinary way as the basis of work, most often curating and embedding my own photography in painting, collage, printmaking, and sculpture. Along with my photographs, I utilize paint, papers of varying types, found objects, and pencil and pen drawing on board and paper. Paper mâché is a recent addition. Image selection is largely symbolic, and the work is episodic, free of specific depiction. I may paint over or under images to convey a message - an invitation to ponder. For me, a collage-based approach allows emotion and symbols to co-exist. My lines/marks match the story of the moment and will reflect only that each time - the unique narrative. In demonstrating the experiences and common denominators of life, I strive to share a moment in time that illustrates an emotional storied experience and thereby create a sense of shared community that may reassure or alarm - asking for further consideration and contemplation.
My work has been included in the following juried exhibitions: at the Highland Park Art Center: Voices & Visions: Standing on the Bridge Between Health and Disease (2020); Of Time & Place (2020); Nature vs. Nurture (2022), Pulp (2024) and in the publication Collage in the House, an International Collection for World Collage Day 2022, Museum of Arts and Design, New York City, as a part of Anne Wilsons: Errant Behaviors and the MAD Drawing Room exhibition, and the East on Central, art and literature publication, 2024/2025.
Painting: Exodus, mixed media - acrylic and photo images on board - Size 20"w x 16"h - 2019