Beginning my life in the sweltering oil town of Bakersfield California I developed a passion for fried eggs and hot pavement. This is probably where my love of hot primary colors juxtaposed against the neutral textures of the streets began. ("So hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk" was the joke about Bakersfield.) My earliest memories are of getting my hands on any art supplies at arm’s reach in the art and frame shop owned by my grandfather. When I wasn’t carefully duplicating pictures of Bugs Bunny and Bambi from How To Draw books, I was skimming the hundreds of art prints for sale in the store’s back room. Margaret Keane’s big eyed waifs with hungry faces were my most beloved paper friends at Grampa’s. And I could easily sit for ages with a print of a Venetian street or Florentine cafe. I was a loner type of kid and my fantasies came to life in those images.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in my early adolescence and art took the backseat to emotional family drama. From this typically dysfunctional family-scape came my interest in psychology and the not always happy truth about what people pretend to be, and what  they really are on the inside. I consider this time of my life to be the sharpener for my intuitive skills regarding the transparencies I see in the people and world around me. A defensive skill that helped me to glean  safety in the moment as a kid, is now  a sensitive gauge through which I always view what’s going on around me.

Music and performing became my art forms when I graduated from high school, and I was in a number of local bands that always managed to dis-band right before getting a chance to be signed. Frustrated with music, and the business of trying to "make-it" , I decided to give visual art a try again.

Now I have a bachelors degree in drawing, painting and metal arts from California College of Art. (Actually from CCAC when it still had the extra "C" on the acronym; acknowledging craft.)The best thing art school did was to teach me how to think critically about the world, and to really see things without assumption and judgement.

Psychology and getting my Masters degree is finally what crystallized my ability to produce a coherent body of work that, like Athena from Zues’  forehead,  has sprung forth fully realized and exactly as I hoped it would  be. Time off to be a mother and live through my thirties filed the edge off of my ego enough for it to get out of the way and let me paint. I look forward to experimenting and showing more in the coming years, while keeping my ego blunt and to the point.