Music has always been a part of my life. While I was growing up in Europe, my parents played the latest Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Dean Martin, Louis Prima and Keely Smith on the Hi Fi¾all the latest cool grooves from the States.
Miami, Florida, where I was born in 1949 and spent intervals between my father’s overseas Air Force assignments, infused a love of Afro Cuban and Caribbean Music and left impressed upon my mind’s eye the colors and forms of the subtropics.
As a teenager, I lived with my Aunt, Uncle and three cousins in the small eastern North Carolina town of Rocky Mount. How dull, you might think, for a girl from Miami who had lived in Europe for years…Not dull at all. During the sixties, under the administration of the then Governor Terry Sandford, North Carolina’s public-school children enjoyed the benefits of his far-sighted educational vision. An arts scholarship to the 1967 Governor’s School for Gifted Children (it is now known simply as the Governor’s School), introduced me to figurative oil painting. Even then my favorite subjects were musicians and dancers.
Between 1968 and 1972, I studied painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. During this period, I struggled with Conceptual and Abstract Art. Upon leaving school, I returned to figurative painting and found my “voice” drawing and painting in my own style of Modernism.
After a bit of the gypsy life, traveling from New England to the Rockies, I settled down in New Orleans for a few years. It was there I began painting jazz musicians¾those who were not famous but who devoted their lives to their art with little expectation of financial reward. They always appreciated the drawings that I gave to them torn from my sketch book. And I always appreciated their inspiration.
Back in Florida, a decade later, first in Sarasota and then Miami, dancers returned to my canvases with drawings and paintings of the ballet, Flamenco and the young swing dancers who were reviving the Lindy at a local club.
In the early 90’s my work began to be published by Felix Rosenstiel’s, a fine art publisher in London, England. That led to my paintings being exhibited and collected in the UK and Europe.
Returning to North Carolina in 2000, building a spacious studio in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains I find that figures with traditional musical instruments echo the voice of the people and the mountains themselves – these ideas continue to inspire me as I explore Appalachian Life.
For more than forty years I have been a working studio artist. Over a thousand individuals and companies have collected my work. I continue to explore and grow within the form of Modernist painting, each new composition a challenge and a reward.
