When I began to experiment with oils, I understood what the poet Pablo Neruda meant when he wrote, “... Something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings.” The arts have always captivated me: dance, theatre, music, literature… but it was not until I picked up oil painting (on a lark, and against the advice of almost everyone I knew), that I found my artistic home.

I am self-taught, by which I mean that I learned by making fantastic messes, and through the kindness of other artists. Over the past decade, I have developed a system of creating mixed media works with oil paint. I love the oil paint’s transparent qualities, which I can manipulate so that the layers of paint, collage, or plaster underneath are either hidden or exposed.

I am an East Dallas artist and a proud Dallas ISD art educator. Many of my works explore places and what they mean to the people who inhabit them. Perhaps because it took me so long to find my own place of creative “belonging,” the idea of home is an ever-present theme in my work. Whether I am painting abstractions from nature, urban scenes or landscapes, I construct images that evoke nostalgia or longing, either for the land or for man-made spaces on it.