Biography

I grew up in Ohio where I received an MFA in Printmaking from Bowling Green State University and an MA in Art History from Ohio State University. New England became my home when I took a teaching position at Bridgewater (MA) State College. When I retired from teaching in 2003, I moved to a work/live loft in a renovated mill building in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where I now work and teach in my studio.

After leaving school, I worked as a printmaker for several years, and then turned to fiber art. For 15 years I had a successful career designing and creating hand dyed, handwoven wall panels. And, then I ran out of inspiration.

When I returned to printmaking, it was with the desire to pursue safer and healthier processes and to utilize safer materials than the traditional, solvent based products. This is when I turned to monoprinting for my own work and when I began to study other alternative processes to introduce to my print students. Several grants enabled me to travel to Scotland, Italy, and Canada as well as locations in the US to investigate these new directions in printmaking with some of the foremost printmakers in the field.

Why I travel

Most of all, I travel because I am intrigued with other cultures. I like to see and experience, as much as possible, how other people live; where they live, worship, and shop; how they earn a living and travel; what they eat and wear; how they celebrate life’s events; and what place art has in their lives. I have traveled extensively all over the world.

Over the years I have traveled for additional reasons. I began traveling because I wanted to see the art and the historical edifices that I had studied in graduate school. I felt a strong connection with many works of art that were the topics of papers I had written, and, at long last, seeing these paintings, sculptures, and prints in European museums provided much pleasure. I especially enjoyed visiting palaces, cathedrals, and other forms of architecture because walking through and gazing at the three-dimensional space is not something that can be appreciated by studying pictures. These experiences enhanced my ability to teach art history.

I have also traveled for purposes of making art. These trips have been where I have settled into a location and have made watercolors, weavings, or prints. Usually these trips have been with other artists, either Americans with whom I am traveling or foreign artists who have signed on for the course of study or are sharing the same studio. Making art in a setting other than home surrounded by other artists stimulates new ideas and inspirations. Often, after these trips my artwork took on new directions.

How travel influences my artwork

For many years I used the landscapes from my travels for my imagery in my art. One series of prints that became a major focus for about three years was after a trip to Iceland. I was taken with awe in response to the dramatic and stark terrain that had been formed by the effects of glaciers, volcanoes, thermal escapes, wind, and erosion.

My recent work is not representational at all; instead it is conceptual. As I travel I keep a journal of each day’s activities, sites, and anecdotal events recorded as diagrams in which meaning is conveyed through a personal form of symbolism. When I return from the trip, I refer to my journals to develop my prints. I layer the images one over another as I build a complex collection of marks and textures that suggests the way my mind remembers the trip - as a fusion of many incidents.

My use of a personal form of iconography in these prints stems from my fascination with the pictographs that I have encountered in my travels. I am particularly intrigued with the mark making left by prehistoric cultures of Great Britain, the Picts in Scotland, and the Native American pictographs of the Southwest. Another influence has been Rudolf Arnheim, author of Visual Thinking, who theorizes that the process of human thinking is carried out with abstract visuals rather words.