Most of my art work is figurative and representational. My paintings and drawings are  based in experiences which have had deep emotional impact on me. The human element is an important key to unlocking the amazing resources of imagination which produce the visual drama of my paintings. While the images in my paintings seem more or less derived from nature they are not intended to be representations of ordinary everyday reality. I enjoy working with bright vivid colors in oil on canvas, in order to evoke a striking experience. As I paint I continuously ponder the structure and concepts of my images in order to insure that they correspond to my sense of the experiences underlying them. Objects depicted in dissimilar ways can become poetic in a painting.

Recently  I have experimented with fabric constructions created with threads and strips of fabric from t-shirts my son with autism tears up on a daily basis. It was an exercise in abstraction and has inspired me to begin painting imaginary shreds on large panels.

I think my art will reward attentive viewers.

I paint things that I like. The list of likable things is growing, as my art evolves.

SMAart Gallery & Studio was founded in September 2012 and opened its doors at 1045 Sutter Street in San Francisco.

SMAart offers gallery exhibits, studio rentals and ceramic classes.  While the center primarily caters to ceramic artists, artists of every media are welcome.  Founder Steven M Allen opened SMAart to fulfill a longtime dream of having a gallery, a place to teach art to the community, and a place to create art in a creative open environment surrounded by other inspiring artists.  

Conveniently located in the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood with access to several major bus lines.  SMAart is also positioned in the heart of the Lower Polk Art Walk offering participating artists access to a burgeoning art scene.

Story of a Comeback: In 2006, I was in a car accident and experienced chronic migraines. These subsequently lead to a diagnosis of fibromyalgia in 2009. At this time, it was as if I was caught in a long, dark tunnel. The tunnel was the dealing with the debilitating pain. I almost thought I wouldn’t be able to do art again.

 To my surprise, there were steps at the end of the tunnel that led to a new place. The first steps started by my working with fused glass. This was something I could work with because of the small and more easily contained nature of the work. I was finding meaning and new strength through the journey as I slowly made my way through the darkness. I found renewal and new energy because of the art that was finding its way back into my life.

The Color of Healing: Turquoise has always been a favorite color of mine. It seemed to always find its way into my art; turquoise glass, and touches of it here and there. It’s a strong color that I’ve always been attracted to. The fusion of blue and green color has always had to be a part of my work. It’s a feeling of centrality and balance. This old favorite became a symbol of the healing light, the healing touch and a force that kept me going through adversity. It’s like my life becomes right somehow when turquoise is present. It continues to find its way into my art, whether in a subtle hint of the color or as a strong and obvious presence.

The New: Paintings and Drawing: I began to work with my old figurative drawings as a way to get back into painting because with fibromyalgia, it was too painful to hold gourds. I realized I could paint easier and play with color. It was more pleasurable for me. One of the few things, I could still do was keep experimenting with acrylic inks, Luna-papers, ice [glitter], colored inks, color-changing nail enamel, acrylic paints, gloss gel medium, gel pens, and different sizes of glitter. In working with paintings and drawings, I start with color and move to the design. The patterns and textures come as I carefully follow wherever the color wants to take me. The colors of the paints and drawings reminded me that one can’t have light, happiness, and growth without pain and darkness. As I embraced and accepted the pain, I found a new light that brings joy as it dances before my eyes, upon the frames, on the walls in front of you. My vision is that these paintings and drawings may provide similar inspiration and lightness for other women who have worked with their own versions of healing and courage.

People often ask me if I like to do puzzles, or tell me I’d make a great dentist (based on the intricate poking, prodding, scraping and filling that I do in my work).  I used to feel that working on mosaics was a way to bring order to chaos, by rearranging a multitude of tiny pieces together to form cohesion.  Realistically, for me, it’s none of these things.  Rather, it’s the possibilities that can come from a variety of pieces and materials.  It both astonishes and entices my mind.  Something about discovering an unknown combination or design that doesn’t exist in the world, is intoxicating.  This is how I feel when I am creating mosaic art.

Mosaics are not a fluid art form; they don’t blend into one another like oil paints, or mold into figures with soft lines that gently curve.  They are rigid and abrupt and can be unforgiving.  However, it’s the adventure to create these illusions, with proper coaxing of the medium, which I find intriguing.  I work with ceramics, glass & stone, like a linguist when they are interpreting.  I feel like I’m giving a voice to materials in a new and expressive way so people can visually understand what the gathering of pieces have to say.

ABOUT ME     

My background is fairly diverse. I grew up with a WWII veteran father who was a radio operator during the war. With the classic DIY mentality of that age, my father built everything he thought up and as soon as I could hold a soldering iron, I was right there with him, grinning, watching the sparks fly and smoke come out.

Growing up I would spend hours every day making stuff up to build. Hacking and circuit-bending old surplus gear to the threshold of destruction, building something that held no “valuable” purpose other to satisfy my curiosity. Sometimes just to make smoke come out.

While I never completed any formal engineering training (electrical or otherwise) I taught myself what I needed to know to become a sound engineer, build and repair musical instruments, amplifiers and musician’s egos. This led me from Oregon to California in the mid seventies where many musicians roamed in need of such services. Not long after moving to San Francisco I joined forces with a partner, built a rehearsal/recording studio and shortly after was back on the road mixing live sound and rebuilding what was broken the night before.

Late in the eighties to gain some “consistency” and to “be home more often”, I took a swing at a “real” job which became another real job and so on and so forth until 2009 when a corporate stooge finally rubbed my last nerve. I pulled the plug and went back to making stuff up. I went back to school to learn welding, sculpture, metal arts, AutoCAD, Solid Works and I’m still going whenever I can.

MY WORK

Life seems overly complicated to me. It can conjure up vague, formless images as placeholders for ideas I don’t fully understand or care about. The work I create can go in any direction fleshing out these placeholders using any medium that suits my needs or is within arm’s reach. I often make jewelry, or giant fire breathing sculptures, or sound emitting objects, or things which either wave at or whistle with the wind. Occasionally I will explore an idea in different forms from small sculptures to painting to jewelry. Other times I will make a piece one way, one time only because it has satisfied my curiosity.

For the past seven years I have developed two artistic styles, both dominated by a preoccupation with the virtual world of the screen. It started when I moved to San Francisco from France in 2006 and suddenly realized I was living in the very movie sets that had entertained my childhood. What were once imaginary backdrops of Hitchcock films now figured prominently in my trips to the store. It was a surreal and unsettling sensation that lead me to question the realities of virtual and real space. It was also at this same time that Facebook and social media spaces started taking hold of popular culture and redefined who and where we were as people. I found myself fascinated with the world as something we understand and live through screens and thus turned to my training as an academic painter to explain and explore these ideas.
    The first of my two styles focused on cinema and my aesthetic experience of it as a child. With a palette knife I reproduced scenes from VHS tapes that had affected me and questioned my relationship with them. It was both a study in these iconic moments that now overlapped into my new geography and an artistic meditation on what the screen actually looked like. Computers had already accustomed us to flat, high definition virtual worlds but the truth is that these scenes were filled with static and  imperfections. My work has pushed me to analyze the power of these memory images, how I see them in relationship to my current life and memories, and to question the overlap of the television screen and the world around me. Recently these questions have lead me to apply the moiré effect found in old television screens to reproduced images from my personal life and Californian culture.
    The second of my styles turned to the concept of the screen as a portal to our identity in the age of internet. I spent eighteen months in residence at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery painting over 180 portraits of people who contacted me through Facebook. I wanted to find a way to bridge my training as a portraitist with the concept of visual identity in a world that was becoming rapidly digital. In a day of excessive personal sharing and over exposure it was fascinating to realize how few of us actually consider our image as something outside of the digital screen space.
    As I continue to explore the concept of the screen and its implications on space and identity, I hope to expand my practice and discover new meaning in an increasingly virtual world through both traditional and modern painting techniques.