Current News and Events (in no particular order)
• Daylight Artist Collective, "Intertwined: Exploring Connections" Closing reception 5/18 (Westerville, OH)
• Ohio Art League Spring Show @ The Works: Ohio Center for History, Art & Technology 4/26-7/5/2025 (Newark, OH)
• Grand Rapids Arts Council - GRAC Pop-Up Art Gallery 5/22 4-8pm (Otsego Park, Bowling Green, OH )
• Hopewell-Louden School's "Art Day" May 6, 2025 with 3rd and a 5th grade class
• Invitational: "From Fields to Facades: Ohio Landscapes" Allen County Museum, May 10 - July 27, 2025 (Lima, OH)
• Pennington Custom Art Services, "Femme Éclectique: We Can Do It!", May 10 - June 28, 2024
...Upcoming...
• Rosewood Art Center's 31st Annual "The View" Landscape Exhibition, 6/9/25 - 7/19/25 (Kettering, OH)
• Springfield Museum of Art, "48th Annual Watercolor Ohio 2025", 9/20 through 11/16, 2025 (Springfield, OH)
• 2025 Cleveland Botanical Gardens/Holden Forests & Garden, Solo Show: "Trails of Immersion" Sept./Oct. (Cleveland, OH)
• Finalist. AcrylicWorks 12: The Best of Acrylic, Artists Magazine, on news stands in September.
“Landscapes” Artist’s Series Statement:
My love of landscape originally developed from the discipline of plein air painting. This discipline was interrupted by Covid lock-downs but became for me a passionate 'escape' because, for me, the immersion ‘in’ the landscape is transportive. These days I find myself taking excursions for hiking/reference trips and although I'm working on pieces in the studio, when I hear my viewers say “oh, I want to be there”, I know that I’ve tapped into their need for escape and immersion as well.
I paint lush landscapes whether 'in the wild' or structured gardens utilizing two separate veins of medium and substrate, either by watercolor on YUPO or acrylic paints on canvas or panel.
I am attracted to the color and luminous nature that the synthetic paper (YUPO) affords. It also enables me to explore textures, enjoy vibrant color that sets upon the surface in an evaporative fashion, and achieve the ‘lush’ escape I’m going for. Concurrently, the use of acrylics with palette knives, ink, utilizing a silicone implement to dot paint and even a technique of whipping paint upon the surface with a string pushes me further into an impressionistic expression with the added excitement of thick texture. I purposefully shy away from using a brush with my acrylic paintings as a necessary crutch for the impressionism I love.
Within these 2 vastly different methods and mediums for producing landscapes, I am drawn not only to the beauty within a scene, but am careful to include beckoning elements of light/shadow, repetition and depth. Scenes chosen revolve around a dance of light and shadow and it's own sense of invitation to explore; pathways are common to include for this reason. Quiet, hidden, reflective/introspective....lush; these are things I look for. I am polarized by scenes that make me forget my troubles and I feel "enveloped", even if just for a moment.
“Genre/Portraiture” Series Artist Statement:
I had been painting landscapes as a way to escape my troubles; and throughout covid, I began to experiment with media, mediums and techniques that I'd never tried before; such as watercolor on Yupo, a synthetic plastic-like paper. I also spent a lot of time with close family (during covid lock-downs) and so my love for genre themes, including portraits, continued to grow and become very personal. This personal nature involves my affections, feelings, and light-hearted approach as my real midwest reality wears upon my sleeve. I consider myself a 'deep thinker', but I'm always looking for humor and hope in life.
Although Yupo is known for it's ease in subtractive painting, I paint in a layered add-on approach... very seldomly 'erasing' what I've laid down. This approach is more painstaking in having to only lay one pass down at a time followed by the time it takes to fully dry in-between passes (because we are talking about evaporation on plastic).. but this method gives me a distinctive look and feel that is uncommon for most purveyors of Yupo. I also find myself using watercolor pencils and ink as well.