“For as long as I can remember, being an artist, creating art, collecting art and being an arts educator, has been an important part of who I am. In 2021, after 30 years as an art teacher in Paramus, NJ, I left education to pursue a full-time career as an artist. I have since been exhibiting regularly throughout NJ, NY and Connecticut.
Since the earliest days of my artistic career, I have been most inspired by the beauty that exists in nature. Working in oils, watercolor, pen and ink and mixed media, much of my work is an abstract expression of the idea that all living things are connected by energy.
In the mid 1990s, I began creating a style of mixed media works on woven paper. Beginning with two or more separate paintings/drawings of organic objects, the images are then cut apart and woven together. Often, I continue painting and collaging upon the resulting weaving. The finished works are representations of energy, movement, and unity.
My recent series, ‘In Lak’Ech’, is dedicated to the idea that we are all connected. In Lak’Ech is a Mayan philosophy which means, ‘I am you, you are me’ or ‘you are my other me’. The works in this series began with individual portraits of people of various ethnicities. The process of weaving these portraits together was challenging in that I wanted to maintain the individuality of each portrait while combining them to form a single harmonious and balanced image. Motivated by the idea that the tapestry of our lives is made richer by the beauty that exists in our diversity, the process itself became a beautiful metaphor for the way in which we are connected to each other.”