| What are your earliest memories related to art? | |
| My Mother was an accomplished painter. I remember going to the Brownsville, Tx Art League with her. I was fascinated by the skull on a desk there and the smell of turpentine. In elementary school one o my favorite pastimes was drawing. | |
| How and when did you start becoming an artist yourself? | |
| I majored in art at UT Austin and soaked up the design and drawing classes. I loved drawing the figure. When I took painting I discovered I was a colorist. | |
| What was the evolution like toward finding your current voice and visual vocabulary? | |
| I went to grad school the first time in San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato, Mx. I loved painting everyday. The city was an art colony and I grew artistically with much exposure to professors from other countries and various locations in the states. A few years later I graduated from UT San Antonio with my MFA in Fine Arts. The drawing , painting and art history I learned there was expansive. I was fortunate that several of my painting professors were excellent artists and mentors. | |
| What is your process like? | |
| I love to paint watercolor landscape on site , making studies for large oil paintings. I usually work small, varying the format of the sheet or varying the depth of the view, whether close up or far away. When I have gathered enough visual information, I lay down washes of thinned out oil paint. Often I will create an underpainting in complementary colors to create a “zing” or high contrast. I then lay down thick paint (impasto) , varying my strokes and sizes of brushes to create texture and variety. I work in a patch like manner as I enjoy patterns found in nature (when painting landscape.) | |
| Is there anything from your artist statement that you wish to expound on, that you normally don’t have the chance to discuss? | |
| Meditation, joy and sanctuary spaces influence my subject matter. One of my greatest influences is Matisse who said, “What I dream of is an art of balance, purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.…a soothing, calming influence on the mind.” | |
| What do you try to control in your surfaces, and what do you leave to chance? | |
| Oftentimes the first washed layers of oil paints merge together to form shapes on their own. These are fun surprises to possibly use in the composition. | |
| Where do you see your work going from here? | |
| I like working in series.…..and I am in the beginning of discovering the East Texas flora . Fall and spring have been very lovely here in Tyler. Exploring East Texas skies, landscape elements and lakes are inspiring me now. | |
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