My studio at Yosemite Place in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood has been my creative refuge for over 15 years, a space in which I delight in the messy, visceral, right-brain world of mixed media painting.  Each piece unfolds through a dynamic process of adding, subtracting, balancing and listening. I move between paint, collage, and mark-making, letting the paintings evolve through instinct, discovery and improvisation. Paper scraps, bold colors, shapes, scribbles and quirky marks —these elements surface and recede as I search for form, rhythm, and resonance.

My work often hints at nature and a sense of place – intricate landscapes where internal weather meets the contours of imagined terrain. I’m drawn to thresholds: shorelines, horizons, portals, bowls and vessels. These forms recur again and again and impart an atmosphere of nourishment, holding, and crossing into places unknown.  

My development as a painter is deeply entwined with two other central aspects of my life: my work as a documentary filmmaker and my experience as the mother of a child with a developmental disability. As a filmmaker, I’ve explored creative forms of visual storytelling—approaches that have shaped how I think about abstraction and meaning in painting. As a mother, I’ve been immersed in the mysteries of non-verbal communication, watching language and perception unfold in nonlinear, often surprising ways. That experience has deeply informed my sensitivity to mark, gesture, color, and the underlying emotional currents of visual language.

In recent years, I’ve been creating a body of work titled Beyond Measure, incorporating collage materials gathered over decades of parenting—educational assessments, worksheets, aptitude tests, and my daughter’s own markings and drawings. Working with these artifacts is both cathartic and transformative. I cut, deface, rearrange, and reimagine these fragments, reclaiming their meaning and repurposing them within new visual constellations.

Throughout my evolution as an artist, I’ve been shaped by the influence of many painters, but none more profoundly than the late Leigh Hyams, my mentor and friend of over twenty years. Leigh taught me to see the art in everything: the negative space between tree branches, the lines in a cracked sidewalk, the color in soil or vegetables, the temperature of light. Her legacy lives in my practice—in the curiosity, joy, and reverence I bring to the act of making.