A woman with blonde hair wearing sunglasses, a black scarf, and a gray jacket smiling outdoors near a flowing river with rocky cliffs and green trees under a clear blue sky.

Inspired by my spectacular surroundings, but I do not paint them

I’m an abstract expressionist artist who paints out of my home studio in the heart of the beautiful Methow Valley, just east of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. And while I am inspired every day by the unspoiled and ever-changing scenery of the foothills and rivers of my surroundings, my paintings are not direct representations of the world around me, but worlds unto themselves that I create through color, form, line and texture. My work has been showcased in multiple national exhibitions where it has taken first and second place.

A woman with a backpack sitting on a mountain trail beside a black dog, overlooking a valley and mountain range with cloudy sky.

A Touch of Madness in the Method

My paintings are large scale emotionally resonant works that can create an immediate, visceral, or even profound emotional response. I believe my paintings have the ability to create emotional impact because of how they’re made. First and foremost, they’re created through passionate exploration and expression, rather than deliberate or calculated planning. For me, painting is a way to tap into my subconscious which leads to more authentic art. It is also a subversive act intended to squash my long-held perfectionist tendencies, as well as to counter the constant striving for perfection inherent in our social media-based culture with its emphasis on highly-stylized and painstakingly planned images that supposedly depict real life.

My paintings are the outcome of a particularly unplanned, instinctive, messy, and iterative process that relies on chance happenings, creates art that feels genuine, and that never fails to surprise me. I apply and remove paint in haste using a variety of techniques, creating layer upon layer, in search of an arrangement that stirs something deep within me. In this era of computer-generated, filtered, and airbrushed images, my art not only accepts, but embraces, the imperfect—the crooked, the smudged, the raw, and the distorted. And because my paintings are neither premeditated, nor painted with a heavy hand, I like to think they are created by me but subject to the whims of the universe. There is almost nothing as fun and exciting as playing with wet paint, letting it fly, and over the course of days or weeks, seeing where it all lands.

My artwork tends to have a primitive or earthy feel to it. It typically features a limited palette that leans toward desaturated color and generally features loose organic forms.

A woman with short hair, wearing sunglasses and a black athletic outfit, standing in a meadow with wildflowers, smiling with her hands on her hips, accompanied by a black dog, in a hilly green landscape under an overcast sky.

You May Feel Something You Can’t Explain

People often seem to connect to my paintings viscerally, meaning the paintings strike a chord on an emotional level without there necessarily being a conscious understanding of why this connection occurs. Take as an example my painting, The Lighthouse. Comments I have heard about this painting include “I get an emotional feeling from it” and “it hit me the most on an emotional level.” When pressed to explain further, viewers can’t seem to go beyond a few basic descriptive words, such as “strong” “dark” or “somber beauty.” The connection between art and viewer is personal, mysterious, and often inexplicable. This is what makes art so powerful.

My goal is to create artwork with distinct personality and energy, that when featured in a space, immediately draws the attention of the visitor, and entices them to move in closer and linger for a while in the more compelling world of a painting.