"Crimson Red Peonies" Painting

My painting project began when I was a child drawing. One day I realized I painted because each painting got better. My love of oil paint, of perception, of ideas, deepens. I love painting the changes in the landscape, the changing light during the day and the changing seasons. My paintings are expressive of wind, birdsongs, snowfall, rain. Getting closer to what I am after keeps me searching for more, I want more. As a child I studied ballet and later, modern jazz, West African dance, Capoeira and Flamenco. Different cultures taught my body how to be in the space around me, even while waiting in a line at the store. Painting is so physical for me. When I have had a good day painting, I have run 100 miles, from country to country. from the painting table back to the canvas, and back and forth like that all day long. My body knows when the painting is going well by how it moves, from my own core strength, just like the tree branch reaches out into the space around it with such grace. My Mother enrolled me in art museum classes when I was six all the way through high school. While waiting for her to pick me up, I met Monet, Joan Mitchell, Matisse, Cezanne and Pissarro. She knew where to find me. My Mother was a role model for me of discipline and becoming brilliant at a craft; she was a performing classical concert pianist all my growing up years. Eventually while I was studying flute for 30 years, we dueted together. I attended Pratt Institute just out of high school, working with the master painters Gabriel Laderman, the sculptor Erlebacher, painters Ernie Briggs and James Gahagan. I took classes with Lennart Anderson at the Art Students League to make certain moving into pure abstract painting was not a mistake. But I was being pulled that way so strongly. I attended receptions at the premiere abstract expressionist gallery in NYC at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery when I was 18. After Pratt I lived all over the country, e.g., graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan where I continued painting but also welding steel and casting in iron and bronze. Every ten years I sent Anita Shapolsky slides of my paintings, which she would return with a note, “keep painting.” Five years ago she liked what she saw and put six of my paintings in a group show, and again this past year she included my work, and accepted one of my paintings into the AS Foundation in PA.