On display in the hallway of Central Bank of Boone County IN downtown Columbia.
February 14th - March 25th, 2025
Artist Statement
Art explores personal landscapes and places in the world, physical, emotional, and political. The world is infinitely beautiful, frightfully fierce yet fragile. My place is at once very small but encompasses all I know and can imagine. My place is color and form, real and imagined.
My first memories of the mystery and glory of art are of visiting my grandfather’s studio which smelled of oil paints, linseed oil, and Camel cigarettes. My parents were both creative, my mother made most of her clothes and my father painted as a hobby. I have made art all my life first with acrylics and then fiber art. It was only as a sideline after jobs and raising children. Since my retirement from nursing, I have concentrated on oil paint and encaustic. Oil paints satisfy me by being very malleable. I get my hands on them, move them around, mix on the canvas and create whatever I can imagine. I still rarely use brushes and normally do not work from photographs or sketches. In fact, I typically don’t know what I’m going to paint until it gradually takes shape over time as I work. Many pieces are reworked over and over again until they become what they were meant to be. It’s a challenging process that I enjoy immensely. Encaustic provides a different sort of challenge yet similar. One does not fully control encaustic. I move paint around with fire, not my fingers. But it still has the element of surprise taking on its own life, revealing its own secrets. It also can be worked and reworked. Unfortunately, this process has at times meant the demise of what was good in the hopes of something better. Something that afflicts every artist I believe. The mystery of when a piece is finished remains a mystery.
