I have painted exclusively in oil for over 50 years.  I have been in assorted galleries or completed paintings on commission since the 1980s.  My style – what I think of as contemporary impressionism – has artistic forebears in Caravaggio, George Bellows, and Ellen de Kooning.  Early in my career as an artist, my style hewed more closely to “traditional” impressionism with faint notes of realism.  

Over the last decade, my style has evolved considerably to something more gestural, loose, layered, and bright.  This evolution has coincided with my newfound preference for the palette knife, which infused new energy and life into my renderings.   While I hesitate to engage in too much commentary about my work, four words encapsulate what animates me as an artist, today.  If my art ever manages to embody soul, it is due to: (1) color, (2) texture, (3) humanity, and (4) intuition.

I became interested in art when I was young, growing up in the Middle East. Born to an Egyptian dad and American mom from a Norwegian enclave in Minnesota.  I spent my early years in Egypt, Sudan, and Iraq.  In the mid-1960s, we lived in Lebanon before the onset of war.  There, I learned at school for the first time what true creativity was.  I moved to America to pursue a degree in…ah, nursing?  Well – my father urged me to be practical.  Art could wait.  As I acclimated to life in America, I got married and found myself juggling five children.  

Art receded into the shadows but it never left the stage.  My artistic impulse satisfied itself with stray lines in my life’s play.  For a time, that meant Tuesday evenings.  I’d leave the kids in my husband’s hands and escape to a local studio to hone my skills.  With time, I built up a portfolio of paintings.  When the kids played, I painted.  So I grew, and I learned.  

All my work is in oil, either painted on canvas or wood panel.  While my portfolio consists of many landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, I am currently most focused on florals, landscapes, and modern translations of historical photography.  My current focus is photography of the daily life of ordinary people taken in the first half of the 20th Century by the U.S. Government’s Farm Security Administration.