My work is vibrant. I can draw easily and am familiar with different materials. Having been trained in painting in the 70’s, I was introduced to Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, as well as the English painters at that time, I love Francis Bacon and Howard Hodgkin. Art history was straight forward as we were looking back at the history that was presented to us in books, With the choices we saw in our lecture theater, I loved Matisse and Bonnard, rejected Renoir and Monet, (too squishy), loved Gauguin and Cezanne over Chagall, preferring their strength to the softness. This does not explain my love of color and pattern, which comes from Tribal African Art . Perhaps it’s a combination of all of it. Reverence for compositional strictness and love of painterly excesses were just right for me. The result is that my style evolved to waft between gestural flourishes and minimalist rigidity.
After a visit to the gardens, I wanted to tell the story of a child gazing into the water so I put her in the middle of the pond..like a water lily pad.
