Artist’s Statement

My deepest feelings and understandings come from a sense of place. As a professor, I have studied its influences on human behavior. As a southern woman, I am certain that the Louisiana haunts of my childhood shaped what I discern and what I love. As an artist, I passionately paint the impression of places on the spirit.

Sometimes these places I paint are from exotic sojourns-- to Samoa in the Peace Corps, to Southeast Asia with Fulbright, or to the American West as a National Park artist-in-residence...always to stand in awe. Or they can be verdant vistas of the Carolina mountains and piedmont where I live today.

I feel beckoned to paint fragile and imperiled environments while they still exist. This calling has sent me to document the rain forests of Papua New Guinea, vanishing rural life in Southeast Asia, and to small island states endangered by sea-level rise and climate change.

I create deep memories of a space and seemingly never forget a location or the path there. If such an attribute is a kind of intelligence or talent, then I am fortunate, as an artist, to have found my way.