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Personal Information
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Born Petoskey, Michigan, 1938
University of Michigan: B.S. in Design, 1960
California Lutheran University: M.A. in Education
General Background
By the age of 4, I knew art would be my future. Pencils, prisms, and homemade pantographs were among my favorite toys.
Growing up in Michigan, I had the advantages of having a mother who was a dedicated teacher, musician, and linguist, and a father engineer with a flair for artistry. Surrounded by resources, my education was enriched by musical training, frequent museum outings, an extensive family library, and father's art studio.
Summers were spent at a summer lake cottage in a wooded area where my parents were raised. My brother and I were given freedom to explore and encouraged to pursue artistic and creative endeavors.
City life afforded easy access to arts and history. As a family we habitually visited Henry Ford Museum, the planetarium at Cranbrook, the Detroit Museum of Art, as well as points of interest all over Michigan.
Attending the University of Michigan, I was exposed to a wide range of fine arts expression, from art history to sculpture, pottery, figure drawing, and painting.
About Portrait Paintings
Two early events influenced my figure and portrait painter career.
My father's hobbies were fishing and painting. As a small girl, I often accompanied him in the cottage rowboat on little fishing trips. To keep me occupied, my father would challenge me to make up as many names as I could to describe the changing colors of the water. I consider this one of the most important art lessons.
When I was older, an amateur painter friend visited my father on a regular basis to teach him how to paint portraits. The subject: me. I adored my father and would have done anything for him, including enduring long hours posing for these would-be-portrait painters. This left an indelible impression on me growing up.
About Landscapes
Summers were spent at the family lake property near my parents' place of birth in northern Michigan. It was a wilderness, characterized by parks and folk crafts everywhere, with agricultural areas rich in ethnic tradition.
Summer days were filled with swimming, fishing, berry picking and learning the mysteries of wood lore from Father. Mom would read American novels such as Tom Sawyer and Moby Dick to us at night. There were family gatherings and community potlucks. But my most vivid childhood visual memories were of chasing sunlight along wild shoreline sand dunes and through piney woods. Sunlight sparkled over the lake surface, loomed through the early morning mists, and turned the twilight woods to black and reddish-gold.
These vivid visual memories inspired my life-long curiosity about the numinous and the luminous. A cross-country car trip after college was the first time I saw the rest of America, and recognized within myself a passion for wide wilderness spaces. These places evoked in me a desire to express those inspired feelings on canvas and paper. I wanted to paint large themes that transcended trends and fashion. For me, light and landscape became visual metaphor, ephemeral and eternal.
