Artist Statement

I arrived at painting after a long career of writing and teaching fiction. In two of my published novels the protagonist is a woman painter. I am inspired by the complexities of vision and sound in New Orleans, the works of American masters Romare Bearden and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as the European expressionists. My work is a conversation between rendering and discovery. I deploy erasure and many forms of collage, often finding a story in my work and adding elements to enhance the emerging meaning.