The Artist

My love affair with the arts began well before I started school. I was drawing and painting plus taking dance lessons (at my insistence) by age three. By thirteen, visual art had overtaken dance and music as my primary interest and talent.

Over the years, first as a student and later as a professional artist, my work has taken many unanticipated twists and turns. After graduating the University of Kansas in 1975 with a Bachelor’s in Art Education with emphasis in Painting and Drawing, I moved to Fort Worth, Texas where I learned the inner workings of museums through my job at The Fort Worth Art Museum (now expanded and renamed The Modern Museum of Fort Worth). I then took a position with the City of Fort Worth teaching art, dance, music and craft classes, including slip-cast ceramics. Though I found ceramics distasteful initially, I eventually found a means of expression with it. Not only did I find ways to enjoy ceramics, but that exposure catalyzed my ceramic career, first with a cottage ceramic business, “Whimsey and Company” and later with more serious fine craft work creating one-of-a-kind commissioned paintings on slip-cast and hand-built ceramic vases, jewelry, sculpture and wall pieces.

After a year as a freelance writer, I returned to ceramics for twelve years, before I began to feel that I’d taken that medium as far as I wanted and found myself longing to return to my original love, painting and drawing. At that time, I was married to a Dallas art dealer and we spent a great deal of time in galleries, artist’s studios and simply being immersed in art.

I noticed through the many conversations I had with artists that those with master’s degrees had a more sophisticated understanding of art, so I returned to graduate school, acquiring my Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Texas in 1997. Through that experience, I did indeed experience a profound deepening of my understanding of art, expanded my repertoire of mediums to include photography (which I used for source material), stone, wood and metal sculpture and video – plus found my true “voice” as an artist.

In 1999 I moved to Austin, Texas. Unable to earn a living in Austin through my artwork alone I worked as an executive recruiter, and in my spare time I created a rewarding way to continue in the style I had developed, doing photographic portrait sessions for clients which then provided the basis for large-scale charcoal portraits, using very strong side-lighting producing a chiaroscuro effect.

I remarried in 2009, and with my dear husband’s support, I have, in the past year, begun to move forward in the vein I consider to be my most significant work, expressing humanist views through feminism as the jumping off point.

In addition to a making art, I also maintain a select life coaching practice; practice “Fluency,” a spiritual access to divine inspiration; co-authored a children’s book about imagination and am working on two other books, one on the power of life coaching and another about understanding contemporary art; continue to dance, play the piano and mandolin; and have been learning to sing and perform songs with a wonderful singer-songwriter friend. I have learned that my soul asks that I be engaged in numerous endeavors and that when I am, I am deeply fulfilled and my soul smiles.