Illuminara

This is a recent Spirit Painting I did and loved doing. The feeling of gentleness and impending magic was all around me during this painting.  I felt the presence of loved ones, guides and an angelic softness all the while. There is also the expectation of something so wondrous about to unfold, yet with such [...]

Remembering summers when Grandma’s wore high heals and gloves, carried pocket books and had permed hair. There were distinct roles people played, and they had clothes that went along with those roles. Grandmas wore floral dresses or something signaling “Matriarch”, and uncles wore suits and smoked pipes. I know these are generalizations, but they are [...]

I used to read Jane Eyre every summer. Something about the summer thunderstorms, the drama of thunder and rain made me want to get back into Jane Eyre’s world.  She’s a good heroine for anyone, and for me, I loved that she drew sketches (not many characters in novels do) and overcame  all kinds of [...]

My entire childhood, during school, I was secretly studying people visually, how they looked, how they moved, how light and shadow defined their features, what the space around them looked like. I pretended to go along with the teacher’s agenda, but the visual rapture of the human figure was where I beamed my true focus [...]

I draw on my clothes. Clothes are an extended sketchbook for me. I make faces and whatever springs forth, especially if there is a stain from paint or if some other unknown splash of taint appears, unwanted on shirts and pants.  This blue person is here because I found a mar and didn’t like what [...]

I was born with what was once called a “Lazy Eye”. This was not a good thing to hear as a young child, it was a value judgement made on me before I could technically be truly “lazy”. Once someone gets older and willfully refuses to do anything at all but lay around, the term [...]

This is a detail from one of my paintings, TREE SPIRIT, part of the NEW VISIONS exhibition at Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, MA (Boston area). Other artists are Maggie Stern (a dear friend of mine), Maureen Cook, Kay Hartung, Joan Mullen, Mark Peterson and CJ Stevens. The opening reception is tomorrow. I’m [...]

I like to make a single brush stroke and then see what comes to mind. These three are people created out of just playing around with some extra paint and having fun making quick strokes and dabs. Being creative is to play, feeling joy is to feel playful! I get into a real great place [...]

I like juggling ideas as they come, choosing the ones which seem like good ideas. You never know until you start materializing an idea (drawing it or writing it down) if it is a good idea or a less good idea (I hate to say “bad” idea because we often learn the most by trying [...]

This is a sketch (pencil with watercolor) that I did of my youngest son when he was about 3 years old. I wanted to capture the beauty of small hands making marks. Facing a blank piece of paper is a very dynamic thing to do. That blank paper says, “What are you going to activate [...]