Since I was a little girl growing up in Houston, Texas, I have loved to draw my fantasies (see our family farm at www.resleycreekpecans.com ). As a Fine Arts Major, I was actively involved in the contemporary art community and began professionally exhibiting in 1975 at Covo de Iongh Gallery (owned by Patricia Covo Johnson, later the art critic at the Houston Chronicle). In 1986 I moved to New York City, exhibiting in galleries such as the Grand Central Art Gallery and the Staley Gallery. Then, when my husband and I moved to Rhode Island, I exhibited there and in Boston as well. In 1997 we moved to South Florida where my work won some juried awards. In 2004, we moved back to NYC where I had my studio in Hell’s Kitchen. Many of the exhibits at various galleries were reviewed. After last year’s cold and brutal winter, I moved back to Florida (Ft. Lauderdale) and am setting up my studio on the beach.
I am lucky enough to have a courtyard where I can indulge my fantasies and create a fairy garden; many of my paintings use sketches I have made from the larvae and nectar butterfly garden I have created. (While living in South Florida, I won an award from Broward County for the native Floridian landscape I put in around our condo on the seashore. I am a member of The New York Horticulture Society – www.hsny.org . Pursuing my studies in martial arts, I have a particular passion for sword work. (www.ymaa.com - school of my Tai Chi master – Dr. Yang Jwing Ming; www.cloudchi.com - my husband’s martial website).
Using the magical elements of water, sky, earth, with the brilliance of birds, insects, and flowers, I try to entice the viewer to enter nature through my fantasies, their mind free-flowing with different perspectives each time one sees the painting.
My paintings become a kind of hallucination; a complex mood at once exhilarated and elegiac. I strive to give form to an unspoken yearning that will sustain the spirit and, hopefully, provide the viewer psychic relief. If there is magic to be found in the web that I weave, then perhaps the observer will discover a universal truth through my paintings.
email: swordbrush@aol.com