Artist Statement
My creative practice is driven by humor, wonder, musicality, joy, love of the line, variation and possibility. I’m inclined to seriousness as much as to silliness, to expressions of sadness and doubt as much as to frivolity, delight, color that clashes and color that sings. Some of my artwork is abstract some of it is figurative and some is engaged with abstraction that bears some figurative legibility but which resists certainty. I’m interested in architectural forms both for their own sake and as analogues for, or signs of, interior experience.
My artwork is usually centered in drawing and traverses multiple modes but most recently I’m using oil and acrylic on canvas.
Although I started drawing before I started writing, poetry is important to me. I earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from UC Irvine, am a winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and a recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer grant for poetry. My first book of poems, Full Nova, was published by Orchises Press and my second, in progress collection, Light, Earth and Blue, features poems written in response to the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. These poems have been on display at the Tate Modern Museum in London as part of the Mark Rothko retrospective (2008) and published in various literary journals.
I am an affiliate faculty member at Antioch University Los Angeles where I teach “Sources of Creativity: Theory and Practice,” “Writing as Seeing,” and various courses in undergraduate creative writing and psychology and graduate clinical psychology. I also taught writing at USC for ten years, and at UC Irvine for seven. Alongside my teaching and art making, I provide postmodern, strength-based therapy as a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and specialize in working with artists and creative people of all kinds. I love what I do!