What I do

“Beauty is truth and truth is beauty,” the poet John Keats once said. I love the challenge of being a part of creating something beautiful. I am inspired by well chosen colors, perfectly placed lines, and simplified images that represent more complex relationships, realities, and stories – there is something honest about them that I feel drawn to. Such honesty gathers strength from the pure elements of design: line, color, composition and form.

I work in traditional media and forms- oils, inks, collage, watercolor, printmaking, dark room photography, clay, installation, murals, etc., – and enjoy taking the risks and making the commitments that they demand, at micro and macro scales. They have formed my artistic imagination indelibly. Yet I also work digitally, and enjoy the captured ‘traces’ of the process that show the dance of adjustments toward the birth of the “final” image. In digital work, all of the “mistakes” along the way are part of the drawing, a palimpsest of the story in a somehow less ethereal way. In all art, though, as Andy Goldsworthy once said, “what is beneath, effects the surface.”

How I do

The most important (and often, most difficult) thing is to simply begin a work. The next most difficult thing is to allow it to be something other than I had first imagined it to be. It is exciting to observe it as it reveals itself, but also can be frustrating and require great patience and a special kind of listening. To let it be created. To hear its voice. To follow its guidance with each element…until it’s done. That is the final most difficult thing. It is, in a way, maternal. This is how we keep working and reveal something honest, something truly unique, which arrives from shared labor. As the time-lapse replay in digital media reveals, it is through the “mistakes” and adjustments that the work can grow, flourish and present itself.

As a mother of three young children, I try to sit down and draw/watercolor/sculpt alongside my children. Their uninhibited imagination and pure joy in making things inspires me. I have to constantly remind myself: just because they are quiet and occupied at the table, doesn’t mean that I should try to squeeze in that next household task (because they never cease!). It means that I should sit down and join them. When it comes to dead-line assignments, though, I typically get most of my creative work done once the children are in bed. That is when I can fully enter my “Walden Pond” of timelessness.

Experience

I am an artist and an educator. I have taught, exhibited and curated internationally: from teaching darkroom and digital photography in Greece, to leading an art history course on the Bauhaus through Germany; from adult illustration workshops in California to elementary school district art exhibitions in BC, Canada.

Saint Katherine College

Adjunct professor of Art
San Marcos, California

Lecturing Artist on B&W
Photography and Digital Imaging

at Hellenic International Studies In the Arts
Paros, Greece

Art History Assistant/Guest lecturer

Art Department Study Abroad Program, Euroterm
Point Loma Nazarene University
Paris, France (etc)

Artist in Residence

West-Mont Montessori School,
Victoria, BC

Vancouver Island School of Art

Guest Teacher
Victoria, BC
Lectures and workshops on “Narrative Illustration” & “Illustration & Contemporary Drawing”

Publications

I love the challenge of working on a children’s book. A lot of planning goes into how it will all tie cohesively together: will it be unified by its minimal color pallet or by how diverse each page is from the next? Does the illustration successfully tell something more than the text has alluded to? I enjoy the creative brainstorming that happens when working with a publisher and being part of a project’s team.

“Mother’s Prayer”

Published by Ancient Faith Press, 2020

“Beautiful Christmas”

Published by Ancient Faith Press, 2019

“Beautiful Things”

Published by Ancient Faith Press, 2018

“When God Made You”

Published by Ancient Faith Press, 2015

“A Child’s Guide to The Divine Liturgy”

Published by Ancient Faith Press, 2014

Awards

NATIONAL OPERA ASSOCIATION, 2010,
set design for The Magic Flute

Let’s Work

I’m always interested in new and exciting projects, so do get in touch.