After graduating from college, I moved back to Charlotte and had a successful decorative painting career for 20 years. In 2008 , I began exploring my true passion and began studying oil painting under Andy Braitman and Susan Matthews . After this internship, I began teaching Fundamentals 1, 2 and 3 at Braitman studio. Because I love to express myself through art, the landscapes I paint are the pl
aces that cause me to take a deep breath... that take me away...that make me feel happy. My vision is to use color and texture to create a piece that can recreate that feeling...to give the viewer a “mini vacation”.The main inspiration for my work is the low country, but other areas I have traveled have provided great ideas as well such as Vancouver, San Francisco, and Napa. I create color and texture driven paintings on a medium to large scale. My work has an impasto style and and a great deal of knife work. I appreciate beautiful brush strokes and am striving to combine all these elements in my finished pieces. It is a joy and a challenge to experiment with color , and I do so by switching between a full palate and a limited palate. I usually begin a piece with a colored under painting and my goal is a achieve a derivative abstract interpretation of my landscape or still life. As a painting progresses , sometimes happy accidents create interest that could not been planned and materials such a turpentine can blur edges of reality. Painting is therapy.... now that I have begun putting it on canvas, I do not ever want to stop.