Born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1965, my family moved to Los Angeles when I was 5 years old and then a few years later to the Bay Area in California. In 1989 I moved to the Jackson area in the Sierra Nevada Mountain foothills of Northern California.
I was a solitary, sensitive and shy child, preferring to be alone with my books, art, animals and music. I would draw and paint incessantly and daydream about a world more gentle and beautiful. I always felt like an outsider-- that I didn't really fit in anywhere. Art became my refuge from the harsh realities, unjustness, and stressors of life that seemed to encroach faster than I liked as I grew into my teenage years.
During college in the mid-1980's, I had the good fortune to take several art classes taught by the late Eileen Gilbert-Hill. She was very active in the Bay Area art scene, and she taught me to see that there were all kinds of ways to render a subject...painting wasn't just about copying what I saw in front of me-- true creativity begins and ends with imagination and a vision. I learned the fundamental rudiments of drawing and painting, but when I reached a certain technical level, I was no longer content to work in the formulized style of representational painting. Anyone can copy...but it takes courage and a fire in the soul-- a desire and passion to imagine and inject a blank canvas with memory, feelings, logic, and intelligence.
In addition to painting, I am also an avid photographer. I had my own darkroom when I was 15 years old-- back in the days of analog film and SLR cameras. Today I shoot mainly in digital, but I have a full darkroom set up in my studio. I have a penchant for healthy vegan cooking, veterinary and human medicine, biology, reading, organic gardening, music, and traveling. I am an advocate for animal welfare and I donate my art to various animal rights organizations across the United States for their silent auctions.
