Rochester, N.Y. is my ‘home town’. My father’s family were artisans. My great grandfather came from Germany as a skilled stone carver. He carved gargoyles and stone decorations on the 19th century buildings in Rochester. My father was a painter, sculptor, carpenter and furniture maker along with running a plumbing and heating business. My mother studied literature and poetry. She was an Art advocate and lover. As a child, I was encouraged to pursue my desire to be an artist.
At Nazareth College of Rochester I developed an abstract-expressionist style of painting. Later at SUNY New Paltz I studied painting in the masters program where I worked with Alex Martin, a ‘Plein Ar’ watercolorist teacher who taught me about ‘landscape gesture’.
As an ‘artist-teacher’’, I began teaching Art in Dutchess County in the Arlington Central Schools and later in the Wappingers Central School district. In the private sector, I taught at the Barrett Art Center, home of the Dutchess County Art Association (DCAA) and became a board director and board president. I received many awards at DCAA and participated in local and national art exhibits and numerous ‘paint-outs’. DCAA has recently merged with The Art Effect in Dutchess County.
Artist Statement
I have always lived near water, trees and hills, south of Rochester in the Finger Lakes region of New York, Dutchess County, in the Hudson Valley - Catskill region and now Nantucket I am most at peace in the landscape. Painting gives me a vehicle of expression and a place ‘to be’. Colors and textures are my language. In Nantucket my palette has changed: blues are ‘more blue’ ,reds and yellows are ’richer’, greens are ‘sandy-grassy, whites are in rainbow skies and paper paths, these colors, these places, this brush, this cloud, this ocean, this idea. As a painter I offer a way in and a way out, the depths and the heights, the day and the night, I offer the cloud and the ocean the you and the me a place to be.