Artist's Statement

Art has been an integral part of my life as long as I can remember.Even as a child, I expressed myself in the visual arts. Not having art materials, no crayons, scissors or glue, I used scraps of paper to build little houses and tiny furniture by tearing slots in the parts and fitting them together. I discovered painting one day while applying dyes to my works in batik. I realized that painting provided the opportunity for the pure self-expression I was looking for.

I have studied art in the various colleges I attended, and workshops from nationally known artists, such as Betty Carr and Carolyn Anderson. My desire has been for schools and the community to understand the great role the arts play in each of our lives every day. I teach art at Dinuba High School and actively support and promote the arts at the city level. I developed and each year chair the Dinuba Festival Of The Arts in May. I have bachelors degree in history, focusing on Medieval Europe. I consider Abby Rubenstein and especially Jerome Grimmer as my mentors, whom I have studied under for the last ten years. Above all, it is the experience, sitting with paint and brush, working and reworking each piece that has been my greatest master.

My subjects and style range from still life, landscape, to figurative work. I consider myself an expressionist painter because of my free use of color to express emotional content. Exuberant brushwork and color, and music for that matter, have a far greater vocabulary for emotions than our language. Each brush stroke is not only a mark of the movement of my brush, but also the thought process of how bright or dull, how long or wide, how light or dark, in the context of every other brushstroke to express the exact feeling I am painting. Look for melodies and arpeggios and accented staccato marks. In all of my art, I celebrate.