ARTIST'S STATEMENT | RESUME | REFLECTIONS

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

For the last ten years I’ve worked almost entirely in landscape, seduced by the interaction of land, water, and light. My deep love of wilderness was kindled by travels with my husband, an avid hiker and backpacker. I began drawing on our long trips with our sons.

I’ve produced several series in charcoal and oil pastel. Larger drawings and paintings are seeded by smaller drawings, which are realized “en plein air.” I always prefer working directly from perception. The work hovers and dips between abstraction and realism, for that is how I see.

My work is specific to place: I hike and climb there, in locations as disparate as the Red River Gorge in my native Kentucky, the dramatic coasts of Quebec province, New Brunswick, Cape Breton - Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, returning over and over again to coastal Maine. . I continue to work from my drawings, sketches, photographs and notes for years after I visit a place. Currently in the studio I’m working on images gathered in Alaska, Vancouver Island, and Mexico.

I like to explore space in my drawings– not only negative space, but how it stretches deep, how far away a horizon can be. Surface is important to me, as well as the calm shapes land makes, the sensual curve of mountains, the secret mouth of a cave, the sinuous path of a waterfall.

While visiting the subtle and harshly beautiful landscape of northwestern Newfoundland, I found myself wanting to embrace the width of what I could see -- describe how it felt to see the whole place. I made sequential drawings, four of which I later joined to make “L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland 1-4.” Although each drawing can stand on its own, the whole transforms the sum of its parts.

At Cap Chat in the Gaspésie in Quebec, I began to push this idea of panoramic drawing. As the hours passed and the tides and the light changed, I stayed and drew the place where the river meets the sea. The result is a wide, deep view, and the changing light and the passing of time show in the final drawing, “Riviere Cap Chat, Gaspésie 1-6.” I find this idea of physical and temporal panorama compelling.