Biography

When I was a four-year-old, I came home crying from nursery school. My teacher had poured the red powdered finger paint on top of the yellow, and not in the center either. Both of these enraged my little being and I spent the rest of the time trying to separate the two colors back into themselves. Failure! My father that night asked why I would not stop crying, and I tried to explain.

His answer to this was to secretly take that paper painting, mat and frame it gorgeously, then enter it into the annual Cleveland Art Museum call to local artists. Well, we got busted when they found out I was not exactly eighteen. But what a validation by my father.

Growing up in Cleveland Ohio, high school took place on the Case Western Reserve University campus. Daily I walked past The Cleveland Institute of Art to get to our building, stopping to gaze with art lust at a future I was too afraid to speak to. My family had fallen apart by then; my mother had left, and I became a frightened young woman with other kinds of questions. Questions I am grateful I got to explore for years in different programs of study. Questions without answers, but that led to increasingly fruitful questions, and to maps of sorts.

It took me until I was almost 50 years old, having lived in Oregon almost thirty years, to take art dreams seriously. Luckily, before then, I landed by accident in other programs that awakened the value of the interdisciplinary, and the hunger for community. Luckily, I got to teach, work and be a mother myself, learning from the pain and problems of prior generations.  Above all, I never lost the hunger to learn, especially from my three sons; I birthed my best teachers before beginning to birth the artist in me. There are some great gifts in all that.

One great thing about coming to art formally as an older person is that you never can doubt you are a beginner. Art is about questions, about “mistakes,” about a slightly distanced exploration of whatever fascinates and also hurts; about asking and healing through joy and materials. There is just no substitute. I do try to live by this great quote by David Foster Wallace:

… it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.