I’ve worked full-time as an artist for forty years – first with lettering and collage, then as a printmaker, and over the last 14 years, as a painter. The three techniques, collage, printmaking and painting, all work together in my paintings, as they are all familiar and meaningful to me in their own ways. I tend to work in three styles as well: starting with abstract work in acrylic, moving to a graphic layer in acrylic and often collage of vintage papers, and in the final layer, painting more realistically in oil. The inspiration for my work comes from childhood memories of being so deeply at ease in the woods and fields of the Hudson River Valley. Nature has given me that peace everywhere I travel to. I believe in the healing power of beauty, and I paint to offer that to people who view or live with my work. One of my current focuses is on Poetic Arks, a body of work in oil pastel of critically endangered animals in arks, which, by definition, protect them from extinction. I paint because I am in love with this Earth. I write poetry when it’s too dark to paint. Paintings and poetry become intimate with each other. And together they tell the Stories that come from mythic memory and a childhood spent in the woods.