Artist Statement

I spent my childhood and teenage years in the state of Colorado, in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. This greatly defined who I was to become, and what I was going to pursue, as an adult. I graduated from Colorado State University with a BFA degree in Graphic Design. After working as a designer and illustrator in Denver, San Francisco and Seattle, I pursued my passion for pastel “en plein air” landscapes followed by a switch to abstract encaustic painting with mixed media collage, art assemblage and photography. My love of Latino folk art and Mexican culture, as well as the beauty of all things worn and aged, permeates my work. Nature, in all its beauty and mystery, also shows up as a consistent theme. I continue to search for the “Universal Mother” through timeless icons and archetypes, due to the loss of my own mother at an early age.

My creative and technical processes consist of surrounding myself in the studio with encaustic wax, oil pastels, artist inks, artist papers, ephemera, sand (from my travels), bark, leaves, rust, found objects, and photographic images. The very scent of molten beeswax gets me into the state of what I call “the other side”, or the creative process. Encaustic wax is a very tactile medium, warm and alive, not unlike human skin. The use of my hands and fingers directly on the wax surface becomes very much a part of the process. I employ many techniques such as scribing into the wax, creating translucent layers of wax, mark-making with oil pastels and water-soluble pencils, rubbing dry pigments onto the wax and embedding my own photo images. I also work with encaustic monotypes, which employs the use of an anodized aluminum plate on a heated surface, and “painting” onto the plate with blocks of encaustic wax. Mark-making and the use of my own stencil designs also play a large part in my painting and printmaking processes. My current explorations involve oils and cold wax medium on paper, and carrying my abstractions even further.

My works are part of private collections in the Northwest, Midwest and East Coast of the United States. My art has been exhibited in both the United States and Canada, and I have been published in encaustiZINE-Winter 2019 issue (International Encaustic Artists), The Pulse of Mixed Media: 100 Artists Revealed (North Light Books/Apter), Cloth • Paper • Scissors, Somerset Studio, Somerset’s Life Images, Somerset Workshop and IndieArts DVD magazines.