2021-2025

During our Covid lockdown my husband and I took many walks through the woods and along the waterways near our home. All of nature took on a different light. Both beautiful and terrifying. I became especially fascinated with sweetgum balls. Their prickly shape, their beauty and their close resemblance to the images of covid particles that were floating around the internet. I collected and photographed them and used the photos as a base for this series. This series presents sweetgum balls in drawings, paintings and sculpture and even with a little humor.

2023- ongoing

I have long admired skies in paintings, from classical to the Barbizon school through impressionist to Magritte and contemporary works. This series is an attempt to bring the timeless images of the skies into our present time. As an urban dweller the the views that I see of the sky are almost always through a grid of wires. I have juxtaposed these images with the black and white images of bare trees against the sky. Both are a play on words of the title of the series: Sky/Lines.

2020-2021

For over four decades I have been fascinated with electrical towers. I have photographed them and even built small models of them in some of my landscapes. I started these paintings in 2020 before Covid sent us into lockdown. They became much more prescient once that happened as we continued our connections with others via our computers on Zoom and other electronic platforms. The power going down exposed our isolation.

2009-2015

This series of landscapes plays with the idea of figure and ground.  The land is a female figure, the figure is the ground, the ground/figure is papered with  real estate ads. Both land and figure appear abused.  Making the land property?  Making the figure (women) property?  The skies are the ground, the backdrop to the figure.  the skies are liquid and floating with energy, both water and air.

1994- ongoing

I began this series with the birth of my daughter and an individual artist grant from Fulton County Arts Council.  It evolved from my series on the homeless and was concerned with issues of making a home and a safe environment for my family.    I have picked up the concerns and they have evolved over the years.  The latest have taken the idea of nesting beyond needs to ideas of collecting and hoarding.

2005-2011

This series concerns the over development of the outskirts of Atlanta.  When I first moved to the northwest corner of Atlanta there were large tracts of heavily wooded and undeveloped land.  Since then most of these areas have been stripped of all trees and vegetation and are covered with new oversized houses. These pieces lament the loss of old growth trees and natural habitat.  The majority of these pieces are small and intimate, like little poems of loss.  

1999-2004

This was the third series to be inspired by the work of Jasper Johns. It began with the idea of sculptures of letters, intending to make them abstract and disconnected to language.  Not being able to divorce letters from words, I switched to the manual alphabet and ended with 26 small pieces or one large piece about language.

"The named is the mother of ten thousand things"  Lao Tsu

1997-1999

This was the second series I did as homage to the work of Jasper Johns.  The ten landscape pieces (0-9) find tragedy in the post-industrial landscape and poetry in the weather report.  Each square piece has a raised, sculptural numeral centered, a "poem" from the weather report and a curved crosshatched land shape.  The crosshatching references both Johns' cross hatching paintings and a draftsman's symbol for ground or earth in a cross sectional drawing.  Lined up in order the pieces have a continuous undulating horizon line and follow the seasons of the year, a reference to Johns' four seasons paintings.

1992-1993

While watching a flag undulating in a breeze, I saw that the shapes were quite like the shapes of an undulating landscape and thought it would be interesting to make three-dimensional flags using papier mache techniques I had worked with in earlier pieces. As homage to Jasper Johns, I decided to use the compositions of his flag paintings for the compositions of this series.  Like Johns, I also used newsprint, however I used it for its content rather than its abstract qualities.  These landscapes offer critque of American culture and politics. 

1987-1991

The early work shown here is where my work first seems to diverge into "landscapes" and "objects."

The landscapes are concerned with environmental issues and were created by invented techniques of model making and papier mache.  They are mostly aeriel views of land forms and often show clashes beween overused and undeveloped land..

The "objects" are mostly box pieces inspired by the work of Joseph Cornell.  The ones shown here are from a series on homeless men. 

In architecture drawing proceeds everything.  I am naturally inclined to approach my art the same way.  Drawings are a way of working out problems in a piece.  And at times the drawings by themselves can be stand alone pieces.

"Art is a verb" a professor of mine once said. The process of making art is equally a part of the art.  These are images of the making of Recumbent Landscape VII.