Origins

I didn’t grow up wanting to be an artist so much as I grew up watching. I was the quiet kid, always observing, always imagining. I loved books, loved the feeling that my toys and the trees in my yard were alive and full of stories. I loved being outside at dusk, when the streetlights came on and houses glowed from within. I liked wondering about the lives unfolding behind those windows, knowing I could return somewhere safe.

The first time art really caught me was when I was eight, in a watercolor class held under a tent in a teacher’s driveway. We painted underwater scenes and sprinkled salt onto wet washes to create bubbles. Watching the paint bloom and do unexpected things felt magical. When she framed our work with real glass, it felt important and elevated. Like this quiet thing I loved actually mattered.

That feeling stayed with me. I remember creating a painting of a snowy field and fence posts. I kept it propped up on my dresser amidst the piles of clothes, and looked at it every morning, thrilled by the possibility that I could make something beautiful that held a particular feeling.

I studied art through high school and college and eventually discovered encaustic. It was love at first sight. The translucency, texture, depth, and organic nature felt like home. I taught myself using library books, a pancake griddle, and tin cans, and sold my first encaustic painting at a local art fair. Then life shifted. I became a mother shortly after college and art was packed away for a time, resurfacing in fragments - drawings at the table, late hours in the garage, stolen pockets of time when the kids were asleep or occupied.

During a traumatic season of upheaval and loss, returning to my studio became a lifeline. Painting allowed me to speak without overexposing myself, to hold emotion symbolically, to invite others into my inner landscape without explaining it away.

It’s all been a gradual evolution over the years but at its core, my work is still about that quiet threshold ,observation, refuge, light in the dark- and the beauty of being small in a vast, mysterious world.