Artist Statement

I am bursting at the seams to paint and paint and paint. I want to fall into the colors and shapes and get away from this sharp world... or enter it more completely. I want to paint to somehow, painfully, achingly, express my duality. I want all and nothing. I want people to see the world as I see it, but I jealously protect my true self and prevent that. I am not a writer, so I will use others' words to express what I feel. My hope is that I will someday touch the same things that these artists touched. Is it all there for anyone to brush against, or is it a secret thing? I feel myself inexorably drawn toward it.

Unknown:
"An Artist is Someone Who Trusts Herself. "


from "The Forest Lover" by Susan Vreeland, about Emily Carr
"Paint the forest darker."

"The current art movement in Paris aims not to reproduce subjects but to represent them through color. It seeks to penetrate the nature of things by bolder brushwork, to interpret by exaggeration, and to convey form with light and color rather than using them as mere decoration on a form. The artist's goal should be to make the strongest possible presentation of his emotional reaction to a subject by using bold color and strong linear patterns."

"The new ideas are big and they fit this big glorious West. I do not say mine is the only way to paint. I only say it's the way that appeals to me."

"Life was short, and shorter still the number of years a person felt bold enough to face a blank canvas"

from "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman
"You shall possess the good of the earth and sun."

"Smile, O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of the departed sunset - earth of the mountains misty-topt!...
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!...
Smile, for your lover comes."

Frida Kahlo
"They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."

Georgia O'Keeffe
"Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something."