Art Life Flow

I have been sharing my art professionally for over 18 years. I began my art career in 2003 in Chicago during my mid-thirties when a creative vision came to me in a flash. This prompted me to resign from my part time job and open a storefront studio. I started out working with large format fine art papers creating beautiful fluid line and circle graphite drawings and continued my mechanical yet very organic fascination of typewriters as a medium for art and poetry. I was also exploring unconventional materials or processes as art form. This early practice of keeping exploration open to flow with my interest in the language of energy is the unifying element of my art journey.

While in Chicago, I began exhibiting my work in creative venues and promoting the development of art in my community by organizing art walks and open studio tours. Two years later, I returned to my native state of Texas to be close to family landing in the Austin area where I continued promoting the value of art to the community. Situated in Smithville and later Bastrop, I contributed a profound influence in my Bastrop art community. For the next six years I was a member of the Bastrop Fine Arts Guild and served on their board. Chaired the Featured Artist Venue, which I transformed by establishing a First Friday Reception Program to the downtown area. I was also a founding member of a downtown gallery that inspired a concentrated area of galleries and studios to pop up. By invitation, I served on the Bastrop Art in Public Places Task Force. My attention to bringing art to the public and my involvement in public art introduced a sculptural element to my work. I built a tower to work on hanging sculpture and also became interested in concrete as a medium for art. Some days I worked with delicate papers for drawing, some with the rigid but moving typewriter machine and others with balancing hanging clanging metal parts.

In 2011 my art direction took a turn with the changing seasons of life. I sought a reconvene with nature. So I went for a six month long walk on the Appalachian Trail where I lived out of a tent and walked for miles every day. The only art I was creating during this time was the art of survival and the art of admiration of surroundings. At the end of the walk I did not return home to where I left off. Instead, I relocated to The Netherlands and experienced a restart living in a situation that encouraged me to express creativity with my basic pencils and only a few new typewriters. At the end of two years, I returned to Texas to be with family where I stayed close to the land working it by day and making art in the evenings. In these four years I had the smallest work space yet pushed the limitations of paper size with creating art on the typewriter. My drawings also revisited a larger format. By 2018 I was back in Austin with a new interest. I became inspired by the fluidity of water color and added it to my mediums to explore in my quest to discover the language of energy.

I find the different mediums that I use to express the beauty of how energy is a communication running through all existence, is unified in the ideas and methods of creating. Organic lines and forms, movements of machines, suspension and balance; working with the fluidity of pigments in water all have a similar theme of definition that is in constant change. My inspiration is energy and how it flows through and connects all things. I enjoy sharing my expression of its communication by working multidimensional through the process of combining creative intention of subject, medium and method.

 I currently live in Austin and work in the northwest rolling hills where I keep a close connection and commune with nature and the human spirit. Here I share my discoveries of the balancing duality of ideas and process in my work, believing all parts that make up an art piece contribute unique attributes and consequences to the whole story. And that story is for you.