About

A Life of Looking

Long before I understood what it meant to be a painter, I was gathering

I grew up at the Jersey Shore surrounded by water, changing skies, wind, and the movement of the ocean. Those early impressions stayed with me. Years later, living in the Florida Keys, I found myself responding again to water and light, not as something new, but as something strangely familiar.

I have come to understand that we never look at a place with completely fresh eyes. We bring our history with us. A particular light, a color, the movement of water or a figure passing through a scene can awaken something remembered.

Travel continued to change what I noticed not simply new places, but different qualities of light, color, atmosphere pace. The practice of yoga reinforced something similiar: attention matters, and being present changes what we are able to see.

Painting became the place where what I see and what I remember could meet.

A woman with gray hair, wearing sunglasses on her head, painting outdoors on a sunny beach. She has a palette of colors and is painting a seaside scene with boats and water on a canvas mounted on an easel. The beach has sand, rocks, and the ocean with a clear blue sky above.

An impressionistic painting of red tulips in a glass vase on a table with a muted background.

Learning to See

My formal art education began at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, but learning to see continued far beyond the classroom.

For many years, flowers became both my profession and another kind of education. Working with them taught me to recognize subtle shifts of color, structure and rhythm, to notice how one color changes because of the color beside it, and how light can completely alter what we think we see.

Those years trained my eye in ways I did not fully understand at the time. Looking closely became instinctive.

The lesson was never simply about flowers. It was about learning to see relationships.

The Practice

Painting became a way of testing everything I had learned

Working both in the studio and outdoors taught me that seeing is only the beginning. Light changes. Water moves. People disappear. A scene refuses to wait while I decide what to do.

Over time, I became less interested in describing everything and more interested in finding the structure beneath it, the large shapes, the value relationships, the movement and the few things that make a place feel like itself.

And repetition changed the work. The more I painted, the more willing I became to trust the first response.

Practice taught me that confidence doesn’t come from adding more. It comes from knowing what matters.

An artist painting outdoors on a boardwalk at sunset, with the ocean and cloudy sky in the background. The artist is wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a white long sleeve shirt, and a blue glove on their hand holding a paintbrush.