Bio
I am an abstract artist, living in Ottawa Canada. I have been showing my work since 2012, through numerous solo and group shows in galleries throughout Ontario Canada. My paintings are held in public collections (City of Ottawa) and private collections throughout Canada and the US.
I have studied at the Ottawa School of Art, the Montreal Visual Arts Centre and the Haliburton School of Art. In the summer of 2011, I participated in the Tony Onley Artist Project in Wells, B.C., mentored by Harold Klunder and Libby Hague. Other artists I've studied with include Hedda Sidla, Blaire Sharpe, David Lafrance and Sharon VanStarkenburg.
My educational background includes a Bachelor's of Social Work, MA English Literature and English as a Second Language training. I've worked as a social worker, as a writer/editor at a social research company, freelanced as an editor, worked in various federal government departments and taught English as a foreign language in Prague for two years. In 2001, I started studying art and recognized it as the vehicle through which I wanted to make sense of the world.
Artist Statement
In my work I explore and make manifest the interior world. Painting is my way of processing societal and personal unease, enabling me to empty the emotion, the excess of my own affective state, out onto the canvas. By portraying emotions and unconscious contents in embodied states, I enable them to inhabit the physical world for examination. I use oil on canvas to create a complex, active and colourful platform to evoke their artform and humour. My work can be interpreted as an invitation to appreciate the complexity that we encapsulate.
My paintings are bold and emotive. They emerge from an open process necessitating lots of painting, marking, erasing, and going back in again, to enable them to breathe. Pentimenti is important to my work for that reason: the works show their emotional history and materiality. The rawness becomes the story as I work, as does the density - altogether it reads as frenzied hyperactivity.