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ARTIST'S STATEMENT
I am stimulated by this incredible and diverse world which offers me as many questions as answers. My art is a response to the mystery I feel all around me. So much variety! Why so many patterns of tree barks, for instance? Why the long migrations of birds? Why ask why indeed. I read science not as a scientist but as an artist for the poetic ideas it offers me.
The similarity of macrocosm to microcosm, space to bacterium, shots from the Hubble telescope often looking like cells under a microscope. I am still thinking of a sentence I read recently about how humans and potatoes are more genetically similar than 2 bacterium! All of life if viewed in a certain way is abstract, but I choose to use real materials to create my prints.
I gather and dry foliage, ferns, flowers like amaryllis, tulips, lillies, snakes , seeds with the thought of ‘’ what will this look like run through the press?’’ I do rubbings of rocks and shells, use dead butterflies as stencils , print the stripe off a jack-in -the-pulpit to collect patterns to use as collage in my artwork. So, my curiosity is the springboard for my monotypes, each unique. The circle is a favorite and recurring motif; it is really not far from the Krebs Cycle to circle, to the Whole, to Holy. This is one of the journeys I am trying to make. The “QUARK” prints were an experiment with gouache. Soon after completing them, I learned of ‘The Six Flavors of Quarks’, the imaginative names of the smallest particles, so named by Nobel Prize winner, Murray Gell-Mann, and knew I wanted to use those names as titles: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange, Charmed. I believe Untitled is over-used in the art world. Walt Whitman wrote, “you must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.”
BRIEF RESUME
| I live in Downeast Maine, though I have deep generational roots in N.H. For twenty years I operated a greenhouse business in the White Mountains, which is why plant material figures prominently in my print imagery. I know plants intimately & love flowers. I bought a Takach press in 2004, and work at home in my studio on the ocean. |
Selected Exhibitions
| 2009 |
Howard Hatch Gallery, Brunswick, Maine |
| Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery of Contemporary Art, Center Sandwich, N.H. |
| Harlow Gallery, Ellsworth, Maine |
| Chapter Two Gallery, Corea Maine |
| 2007 | The Edge of Maine Gallery, Brownfield, Maine |
| 2004 | New England Printmakers ShowBridgewater, MA |
| 1995 | Manchester Technical Institute, Manchester, NH |
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Education
| Montserrat College of Art |
| Attended summer sessions at Bennington College/Art NE with Catherine Keirnan and printed for 10 years at Mixit Print Studio, Somerville, Ma. |
| Haystack Summer session 1997, paper lithography with Alice Spencer |
| Zea Mays, Florence Ma. etching with Liz Chaflin |
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Collections
| My work is in private collections on both coasts. |
