I want my paintings to make you feel something.
Not just look at something. The brushwork is how I get there — bold, alla prima, palette knife when the moment calls for it. I don’t want my work to feel cookie-cutter. It has to feel authentic. Like a feeling, not just an image.
Most people who buy from me tell me the same thing: their painting makes them feel a certain way every time they walk past it. Calmer. Happier. More at home in their own house. That’s what I’m aiming for.
How I got here
I didn’t grow up calling myself an artist. I started painting in 1994, after we moved to California with two young kids. I learned mural painting first, then found my way to plein air — painting outdoors, on location, with the wind and the light moving while I work.
My teacher was Pam Glover. Pam was one of the foremost plein-air painters in Northern California, and she’d trained for four years with Lundy Siegriest — son of Louis Siegriest, an original member of the Society of Six, the Oakland-based group that, in the 1920s, invented California modernism on canvas. Pam founded “The Outsiders,” a plein-air group based in Orinda. She passed in 2010. Her students still meet every week to paint outdoors together; we call ourselves the Glover Group.
That tradition — color-forward, brushwork-first, painted on location — is what shows up on every canvas I make. It’s a thirty-year practice now.
A new chapter
In 2025 I moved to San Clemente, California. After years of painting the Northern California foothills, the Bay Area waterfronts, and the Mother Lode country, I’ve started painting Southern California — the Pacific light, the eucalyptus, the pier. I’m an active member of the San Clemente Art Association, and recently entered the local juried-show circuit.
If you collected my Northern California work, the same hand is making the new pieces. Different light. Same brush.
Painting from a Citroën
My husband and I have been driving Citroëns since 2012. On one trip to Normandy a Parisian doctor let me drive his blue 1972 DS 21 station wagon — five-speed, column shift, the whole French-countryside thing. I told my husband, “if I ever owned a Citroën, it would have to be this one. Perfect for a plein air painter.” The doctor told him afterward, “She passed the test.”
To my surprise, in 2013 my husband tracked down the same model in Grass Valley, California, and bought it for me. It’s my plein air car now — I use it as an outdoor studio. I’ve carried it (and a lot of wet canvas boards in pizza boxes) through Normandy, Bordeaux, Provence, Basque country, and Paris, painting on location at many of the same spots Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir worked.
In 2019 the Sacramento Citroën club asked me to paint four 18 × 40″ French-countryside murals to be blown up into 8 × 20′ backdrops for the French cars at the Los Angeles Classic Auto Show. My own Citroën was parked in the exhibit too, set up with my easel — the car-as-outdoor-studio, on display. The club won the award for best display.
Read the full interview in OutdoorPainter / PleinAir magazine: Love of Plein Air, and Citroën Cars (2019).