How long have you been creating?

One of my earliest memories is of falling in love with the way rows of thread are arranged by color in a fabric store, and my mother tells me I would play for hours with scraps of fabric my grandmother gave me. By age five or six I was painting with acrylics and relishing my art projects at school. I was also very aware of my visual environment even at that early age; I remember being fascinated by the rainbow of color I saw on dust falling through a shaft of light coming through a window in our basement.

I knew by age eight I wanted to be an artist and I've never wavered.

How would you describe your work? Color is very important and achieving a certain "je ne sais quoi" is very important. I want a harmony in the work.

What are you motivations for creating? I want to make something beautiful.

Have you seen any art that has moved you recently?

All the time. I really love art, especially the old-fashioned two-dimensional drawing and painting kind of art. For better or worse - probably for worse - a lot of the art I look at is in the form of a reproduction. Recently I've been looking at some reproductions of Joan Mitchell's paintings, which are pretty awesome.

What do you find visually stimulating right now?

Hands down, my garden, which I am deeply in love with.

What's the last book you read?

The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices, by Xinran. This is a book of true stories about women in the PRC. Many of them were children at the time of the revolution and lived through the cultural revolution. It's a profoundly sad book but for me it was an eye-opener. I'm addicted to memoirs, for some reason. I can't get enough of them.

Your work, while often abstracted, has a strong sense of nature and the natural. Tell us a little about your approach to abstract art.

I think that my "subject matter" is human interaction with the natural world. In other words, that is something I think about a great deal and is usually in some sense the origin of my imagery. And just as the natural world is constantly in flux, movement is very important in my work.

At the same time, my approach to making art is intuitive and my process is fluid, open and experimental. As the painting evolves I make new decisions about the outcome and I do not know ahead of time what the painting will look like.

Basically, while I greatly admire artists who work in a realistic style, a careful rendering needs to be planned out early on and tends to have a stillness to it. So the abstraction is essentially a by-product of my process.

What would you like your fellow EBSQ artists and our collectors to know about you and/or your work?

I'm deeply committed to my work, and I'm ambitious for it.