BIOGRAPHY and PROFESSIONAL
ACHIEVEMENTS
My paintings reflect my appreciation and
reverence for nature. Growing up in the anthracite coal mining region of
northeastern Pennsylvania, I was painfully aware of ways that some
people destroyed their environment-- burning slag piles marred the
landscape and fouled the air, and, often, neighborhood houses sank into
empty mine shafts. These childhood memories account for my sustained
focus to live in harmony with the environment.
In 1986, I volunteered to help clean beaches on
National Beach Clean-up Day. Dismayed by the beach debris discarded by
people on the shore and in the water, I decided to convert this detritus
into expressive art. What followed was many years of community projects
and environmental art that contributed to awareness of pollution as a
global problem. I had an invitational exhibition in Greece and Hungary
and received a Proclamation from the Westchester County, N.Y. Board of
Legislators for calling attention, through my art, to the need to clean
up the environment .In Budapest, I presented a slide lecture on ”Art and
the Environment” for the world conference celebrating the 50th
anniversary of The Fulbright Association. (My Fulbright was in 1992 to
The Netherlands)
I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts
Degree in Painting from Carnegie Mellon
University and an MA in Art Education from Hunter College. At Hunter, I
studied sculpture with George Sugarman and Tony Smith; at CMU, I studied
painting with Sam Rosenberg and color with Josef Albers.
As an art teacher, I received several awards
including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to paint in
Italy, and a Christa McAuliffe Fellowship from the U.S. Government in
memory of the teacher-astronaut. After attending a shuttle launch at The
Kennedy Space Center as a guest of NASA, I began to create space
paintings of the cosmos. Deeply influenced by the movies taken by the
astronauts and the images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, I
explored outer space, star explosions, nebulae, comets and other
celestial phenomena. Many new paintings unfolded, and I became an active
member of the International Association of Astronomical Artists.
Currently, my focus has transitioned from the
heavens to the earth, and I returned to the subject of water as a source
of life and sustenance. My waterfall paintings are visions of the forces
of nature and the energy of life reflecting my relationship to the many
natural environments I have visited. Some of my journeys to visit
waterfalls have been to Yellowstone National Park, Bull’s Bridge and
Chapman Falls in CT., the Delaware Water Gap Recreational Park, Bushkill
Falls in the Poconos, PA, Shenandoah National Park, VA, the Adirondack
Mountains of NY state, and many sites in Costa Rica.
Water cascading in a glen creates music. All the
many things that water represents come rushing to my mind—the power,
purity, meditative capacity, the ions that give you a “lift,” the way
that water is constantly recycling from clouds to rain to rivers, how it
alters rocks, transports us to far-off places and sustains life. This is
what compels me to draw, to contemplate and to paint natural landscapes.
