I am an artist and writer raised in Great Neck, New York. Having spent my young adulthood in New York City where I graduated from Pratt Institute, I later moved to Boston for an MFA in art education. To support my life-long pursuit of painting, I taught art at he Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA. My work has appeared in group shows and I have had numerous one-woman shows in the Boston area.

For me painting is about the personal expressed in color, be it dreams, still lives, or landscapes. My most transporting moment is being in a landscape, seated at my easel and painting into what I see until the boundaries dissolve and I become one with where I am.

Some mornings I awaken blessed with a dream that gives me an idea for a painting which can evolve into a series or paintings. Dreams being so ephemeral, moving from my mind’s eye to an image-on-canvas is a process that awaits the moment of tipsiness when the sense of a dreamscape can be achieved.

Other moments of inspiration can be a still life of flowers from my own garden; animal figurines made animate by placing them in a landscape setting; pottery shards on a beach; or apples in a waterscape setting.

When I moved from New England to Tucson Arizona, I approached this foreign landscape by painting the literal until I felt confident enough to move to a more personal interpretation. The Sonoran desert offered so little feeling of intimacy, it was when I settled into the series Desert Contained, portraits of cacti in pots, that I found my comfort zone.

Please visit the article by Beth Surdut in Desert Leaf magazine and view my open studio tour to learn more of my story.