My art and life has been an evolution of color and represents a rise out of darkness. Twenty-four years ago after entering recovery for addiction, I discovered I was an artist while taking a 12 week course on creative recovery. My first art was collage - on bowling pins. A whole new world opened for me and I knew I wanted to paint, explore texture, and experiment with putting bold, vibrant colors together.

My intuitive abstract paintings reflect my love of wild colors, my constant curiosity, playfulness and joyful spirit with a smidge of sassiness and irreverence to keep life interesting. I work in layers starting with plaster for texture, covered with bold colorful swaths of oil paint mixed with cold wax. I scrape, add more layers, make marks and scratch into the paint until a composition begins to emerge.

I am a collector, energized by hunting for materials to use in my art, especially old worn out objects and ephemera. When I see a beat up vintage tin or discover a rusty piece of metal, I hyperventilate. When I discover a stack of battered old books, my heart skips a beat, knowing that once I have ripped them apart, I will have a pile of faded fragments to use in my Salvage Collages. I'm excited about the opportunity to give new life to these cast off, expendable objects. My mixed media pieces reflect the passage of time, and I am thrilled to repurpose the scraps that are worn and weathered, transforming the aged and tattered pieces into something unexpected and beautiful, celebrating their fragile decay.

My art, regardless of medium, is punctuated by layers of color, texture, history, and unpredictable combinations.