As a little girl, I so wanted one of the huge crayon boxes when we did back to school shopping.  I got the practical 16 color set.  I have always loved color and as I have matured, the play of color with light.  My father was an artist.  I got my first lesson in perspective from him when I was around five or six because the houses I drew with a triangle on top of a square drove him a little crazy.  When he died, the only possessions of his I really wanted were his art supplies.

I took a roundabout career path, though, getting a BS and and an MS in theoretical mathematics  and working for many years as a software developer.  Maybe I wanted to be able to buy my kids the jumbo color box of crayons.  When they were little, I was fortunate enough to be able to stay home with them and that’s when I started painting using my inherited supplies.  I took art classes with Linda Vance in Hoover, Alabama for several years.  Around that time I also took a workshop from Nancy Honea and fell in love with portrait painting.  But once the kids all started school, I went back to work and only painted occasionally, until I retired in 2014.

Although my formal art educational ended with high school, I do not consider myself self taught.  Since I retired, I have taken classes with Terry Strickland, Dori DeCamellis, and Amy Peterson.  Wonderful teachers, all.  I have done workshops with Jonathan Matthews, David Baird, Henry Stinson and others.

Most of my work is done in oil.  I like to work from life whenever possible to best capture the effects of light on my subjects.  Flowers from my garden are a favorite subject.  I try to express my delight at the beauty I see in my everyday life.  I especially enjoy still life and portrait and figure paintings.  When I retired I told people who asked what I would do that I would sleep until the sun came up and then paint pictures of children on the beach.  And now I have access to all the colors I could have ever imagined.