My work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in galleries and museums throughout the United States, including the Gomez Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland; O.K. Harris in New York City; and Gallery K in Washington, DC. The lithographs were featured at this year’s annual international print fair held at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and a pulp paper painting with drawing will be included in the upcoming exhibition entitled “On Of or About Paper”. It will take place in California at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art.
Recently I received a generous award from the Maryland State Arts Council and two more invitations to participate in residencies: one from the Vermont Studio Center and the other through Maryland Institute College of Art to go to Rochefort in France. My work can be found in the collections of the US State Department and also that of Kenyon College in Ohio. Private collectors number between one and two hundred. Articles written about the work have appeared in The Baltimore Sun, The New Mexican, The Plain Dealer and The Columbus Dispatch, to name a few. Writers include the art critic Carter Ratcliff, curator Angela Adams of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
My exhibition career was flourishing until about twelve years ago when I stopped showing so I could create and run what became a successful fabric design business. After selling the business, I began creating a new body of work that now, in addition to monoprints and relief prints, includes several new printmaking techniques: silkscreen, lithography and intaglio. The University of Maryland at Towson invited me to be a visiting artist for two years in the printmaking division with the assistance of a graduate student.
Artists whose work has influenced me include, most importantly, Jackson Pollock; he uses no horizon line or specific light source and is consequently not limited by time or place. The layering of extatic painted gestures give the illusion of perpetual movement. I’m drawn to Jean Dubuffet’s ribald humor, his easy, accessible characters, and the rich physicality of his surfaces. More recently Ellen Gallagher’s elegant and sober repetitions of humble imagery have me engaged in her process.
I’ve always made art; it’s what I do. It’s kept me alive and allowed me to begin to make sense of the world. My work concerns the relationship between chaos and order. Layers are created using figures, faces, household objects and architecture as they skid across the paper or canvas pushing and shoving to jockey for position. Once the composition has tipped over into chaos, I quickly move in with one image and repeat it, almost in a military formation. The underlying layer causes breaks in the illusory order and reveals bits of the visual chaos below. I’m looking for the energized surface that can result from the quiet clanking of these dissonant layers.