How long have you been creating?

Umm, let's see...one of my earliest memories is me on the floor on my stomach, propped up by elbows and surrounded by crayons. What holds my attention, for hours at a time, is my mission to make sure every colorbook shape is colored in. In the years that I didn't do two dimensional art, looking back now I can see I was still creating, making clothes, knitting, crocheting and hooking rugs.

What is your media of choice?

Painting is my passion and at the moment my two favorite mediums are watercolor and oil.

What are you motivations for creating?

What motivates me to create is my emotional response to a subject. When I see the way sunlight plays on a landscape or the unsurpassed beauty of a flower, it moves me emotionally and I want to capture that reaction in paint.

What other artists or movements inform your work?

Right now the Post Impressionist Period is most intriguing. Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard are two artists that come to mind. Bonnard had a superb sense of color and an intriguing way of often playfully placing his figures so that they were peeking in from the edge of the canvas.

What do you find visually stimulating right now?

What stimulates me is being aware of the expansiveness in a landscape of hills and valleys, patterned with patchwork fields. Or watching the interaction between animals, for instance two horses standing side by side, their noses touching. Or a cat whose best friend is her dog.

What's the last book you read?

The last book I read was a book from the library on Cézanne and am now reading John Steinbeck's great novel, The Grapes of Wrath. It was on Oprah's best books list, need I say more?

Tell us about some of your artistic goals for 2006.

My most important goal for 2006 is to keep painting everyday and everyday try something new, a new color, a new brush, a new approach, anything that will help me to keep learning and growing to be more creative.

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

Being an artist to me is a life journey of exploration and learning. I'm never satisfied for very long with the way I create art. Once I feel comfortable with a certain style or technique, I move on to try another approach. It would be so easy to stay with a tried and true style and technique of painting , but I believe being an artist is more than that. The history of art tells us that the truly great painters were always searching for new ways to portray their feelings and emotions to their viewers. And as an artist this is what I strive for. Oh yes, and one last important thing, to have fun and enjoy the process.