I’m a painter and collage artist living in Northern New Mexico just outside of Santa Fe. I moved here in 2014 from the San Francisco Bay Area. I grew up in a military family, so I spent an influential part of my childhood living in Japan, outside of Tokyo and later in Yokohama. We didn’t have American television--although we had a theater that screened English-language American movies. As children, we spent a lot of time reading, drawing and coloring, or acting out the roles from the library books we read or the 1960s films we had seen—James Bond spy stories, big gladiator epics, cowboy movies. Having to be resourceful in that way was conducive to imagination and creativity; living outside of American popular culture, and being exposed at a young age to Japanese refined, nature-based aesthetics, was a powerful formative experience.

During the five decades when I lived and worked in the Bay Area, I was immersed in every aspect of the art world. While I painted and exhibited my own work, I also led graduate seminars and taught studio classes and professional practice courses for artists. I worked for many years as a contributing critic and editor at a West Coast-based art publication, and curated exhibitions for regional academic and non-profit venues.

During those years, I was fortunate to meet a teacher who introduced me to kundalini meditation practice. In the interstices between work, I traveled to Europe, Asia and India, seeing museums, the remains of ancient cities, historic temples in rock-cut caves, palaces, forts and churches. In travel, everything is unfamiliar and new, waking you up to the immediate moment. My meditation practice merged with the experience of seeing these sites, opening my awareness to environment, location, atmosphere, light and structure. This awareness of specific elements in architecture and geography, coupled with my ongoing meditation practice, influenced my studio work and led me to visual series synthesizing formal elements like pattern, structure, gesture and color.

Since moving to New Mexico, the physical presence of the landscape, dramatic skies, seasonal changes and the historic architecture of this region, have become daily, lived experiences that mirror the expansiveness of my meditation practice and inspire my studio work.