A love of pattern and textiles is the thread that has bound my work for 30 years. From textile designer to fine artist, the repeated surfaces of fabric, wallpaper and tile are an endless source of inspiration to me. I am drawn to intricate, ornate, and highly decorative work.

My first series of paintings explored a fascination with Byzantine-era icons and the wish to create something that would evoke the mystique of these relics. I taught myself the customary skills of gessoing, gilding, and painting with egg tempera to create something that felt authentic but new to me. This series explored fruit as the divine and combined the religious elements of Islamic geometric patterns in a setting associated with Christianity. To further this work and study traditional icon making more rigorously, I was set for an apprenticeship in Krakow, Poland for the spring of 2020. Then Covid pandemic upended everyone’s lives.

Without the further growth I had hoped for, the work became stagnant for me. I became frustrated with gilding and painting with egg tempera.

Somewhere in the ebb and flow of playing with new ideas I came across something that felt lighthearted. Fusing three dimensional objects with their patterned backdrop as much as possible while still staying true to reality.

The colors, fruit, flowers, and patterns in this new series are all very decorative and feminine. I take pleasure in the complexity and detail it takes to create them and appreciate that in the end, they are simply joyful riots of color with everyday objects. Although I changed my medium to watercolor, I continued to paint with them as if they were egg tempera, building intensity of color with dry brush, layer by layer.