“People are a composite of the stories of their lives.  Through my artwork I want to share with you the lives which have impacted me and the events that have made my life richer.  If I can touch your heart, make you smile, or move you in any way, that’s all the better.”

This is my story: Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the US, I began drawing as a young girl.  While the other girls were drawing princesses, I was drawing three-masted sailing ships.  I don’t know why.  With Pittsburgh being at the confluence of three rivers, I sure didn’t see the Cutty Sark there.  Maybe it just fed my sense of adventure and imagination.  However, like most children of my generation, I was encouraged to give up art for “something that will put food on the table.”  I went into the sciences, specifically microbiology.  The inexact nature of the biological sciences kept imagination and creativity alive.  I would still draw from time to time but mostly I concentrated on career and family.  It wasn’t until the kids were in college and I had left the industrial job market that I had a chance to pick up art again.

I first went into hand-thrown pottery.  It was great fun (and a great messy art!).  My husband is a geologist and together we got a kick of mixing our own glazes – me because of the color and him because of “the ingredients are just crushed up rocks!”  But like I said, pottery is messy, plus pieces collectively were heavy, and it required wheels, kilns, etc.  I was soon looking for something easier to live with.

I went back to the drawing board -literally- in the 1990’s with graphite and a “new” medium, colored pencil.  I say “new” here because, although colored pencils aren’t new, artists began looking at them in a fine-art artistic way.  And they were clean.  I took classes in drawing at the local community college and even had a workshop by the amazing teacher and artist, Janie Gildow.  Drawing classes at the college morphed into watercolor classes, both with Paula Adams, and I was on my way.

Then came the opportunity of a lifetime.  My husband, still a geologist and in the oil business, was offered an overseas assignment in the Middle East country of Oman.  We jumped on it.  We left the kids firmly ensconced in university and headed to the city of Muscat in 2010.  We’ve never looked back.

I never in a million years expected to be able to study art in Oman.  The Muslim countries are only recently dipping a toe into representational art.  I think everyone in the world knows that Muslims are forbidden to make an image of the Prophet Mohammed but did that extend to images of animals?  Of landscapes? How about just regular people?  They needed time to work out the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.  There certainly wasn’t a paucity of portraits of His Majesty, the Sultan.  Omani artists were studying fine art abroad and bringing back that knowledge to the thrill of their countrymen and women.  So it was in Oman that I began studying drawing and painting on a whole new level.

My first teacher here was the Russian-born, Omani naturalized Anna Dudchenko.  I’m still her student and now happy to call her my friend.  She taught me in the traditional manner of the Russian school and I just lapped it up.  Under her tutelage over the last five years I’ve studied acrylic painting “In the Style of the Impressionist Masters”, portrait drawing, and oil painting.

I also had the opportunity to study watercolor painting again this time with the Sudanese artist, Abdelwahab Noor.  With him I dabbled in mixed media as well.  He has an amazing sense of color relationships and I think that was the biggest gift I got from his teaching.