Artist Statement

My work reflects my surroundings, here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The particular kind of north woods landscape, its trees, rocks, lake, waterfalls, animals are what imprinted me as a child and to which I came back in 1998, looking for that which felt like home.

I was trained as an abstract expressionist painter in graduate school.  This grounding has carried me through a lifetime of working with imagery as well as abstractions.  Shapes and negative spaces form the skeleton which holds the meanings, both articulate and inarticulate, of my expression.  Sometimes the abstractions evolve into tree shapes, especially birch trees. And animals have continued to appear in my work in various guises.  One direction had to do with the animals of the Kalevala, the old Finnish epic; the beauty and mystery of its imagery is haunting. Why does the gray dog keep barking?