About
I grew up during the 1980s in the cultural desert of suburban New Jersey. The only child of a German immigrant mother and much older father, our trio was out of sync with the locals and with mainstream American obsessions of the time - malls and sports. The first hints that there was something else “out there” came in the form of indie rock mix tapes, Beat writers, and an introduction to my first artistic love, German Expressionism. Being an artist meant dropping out of society and finding a place in the margins. This continues to be an ideal of mine, though it is difficult to maintain as the need for financial security always seems to be interfering with my aspirations for freedom.
After living in various parts of Brooklyn for 23 years, and after spending the pandemic in an apartment with toddler twins and husband, we made a move to the rocky woods outside of Kingston, NY. I fantasize about establishing a utopian artist community here, or something like the seasonal communities David Graebner describes in “The Dawn of Everything”. Being close to nature has been a revelation. I enjoy raising chickens and I imagine planting a food forest. I dream of undergoing extensive Jungian analysis before turning 60.
Painting
Painting is a devotional act, connecting us to our earliest ancestors, who applied pigment to cave walls. It’s an arena for making connections between deep history and the present, embodied moment. I go through periods of focused research which lead to discreet bodies of work. The common thread is a quest for existential meaning and an expressionistic, primal handling of paint. I turn to painting as the most immediate and reliable medium for channeling experiences and thoughts.
Although my paintings are grounded in research, that information gets set aside, and I work intuitively and vigorously through material exploration. I allow myself to be guided towards an unknown destination. Opening this channel of discovery leads to surprising results, sometimes humorous, sometimes beautiful, sometimes failures, but always unexpected. There’s a lot of risk involved. It is the cost of the real down and dirty magic of painting; a porthole to a different world.