My first semester in the university I took Life Drawing and four core classes. One of them was Intro to Psychology. I fell hard for the brain and for learning. The more I knew, the more I wanted to know, so the decision was effortless to pursue psychology as a career with the ultimate goal of doing research and teaching.
In my senior year I read a book by the Russian neurologist Alexander Luria that completed the shaping of my future for the next 20 years. I graduated from the doctoral program in 1988 and began my career as a clinical neuropsychologist.

The work has been intense and rewarding. I do not regret my choice. But around the mid 90’s I began to feel an unease that I could not ignore nor resolve. I worked in my garden, constantly adding or changing to achieve colors and textures. I made quilts obsessively for two years, each next quilt becoming less and less structured. Still, the feeling that I was missing something in my life was very strong.

Around that time my father became ill. He got so weak that he could no longer enjoy his favorite hobby of making model ships from scratch. So he began to paint in watercolor. On the weekly phone calls we talked about this as a cover up for things we would never say out loud, and for emotions we could not express. Because he was doing watercolors I signed up for a 6 week, once a week class offered by the city of Ventura, where I live. Three weeks later I enrolled in watercolor painting in the community college.

My good luck, the only night class in that media was taught by Beverly Decker. I don’t know how she does it, but I have attended as many of her classes as I could so I can tell you: Every student ends the semester having achieved incredible progress. But Beverly never corrects. She “only” demonstrates and encourages.

By the middle of the semester I had taken over the downstairs of my house with ongoing projects. Two years later we remodeled so I could have a studio of my own upstairs. Meanwhile Beverly introduced me to monotypes, and this has become my first love. I bought a small press and worked almost exclusively on monotypes for more than a year. As things go, not long after the remodeling project was finished I had the chance to buy my own medium size press. Too large and heavy for upstairs, I put it in the garage. That was too limiting, so when the opportunity came to become involved in the Bell Arts Factory, I signed up for studio space there.

I am most interested in exploring color in composition, although I can get quite excited about form alone. Colors, shapes, relationships and contrasts, and how they can change or interact. Sometimes my dreams give me images, beautiful images that disappear when I’m awake. I think the images are there somewhere, pushing to come out of my hands. My work is mostly non-representational or abstract, but sometimes I do representational images as a way to re-ground myself in observation of forms and relationships. Water media and oil etching inks in my monotypes are standards. But collage and transfers also happen in my work sometimes.

In 2001 I was introduced to book art. The intimate nature of the viewer-image relationship is very appealing to me. In addition, book art is the ideal form to work in collaboration with other artists, and these types of projects are very appealing to me. I have worked with one-of-a-kind forms but plan to do limited edition volumes in the near future.

I owe Beverly Decker and Saul Bernstein, wonderful teachers, a debt of gratitude and love. I owe Kandinsky, Diebenkorn, and Arshile Gorky the implicit permission to experiment and let my style change as new issues arise or new perspective develops.