After teaching studio art and humanities in the Michigan public schools for 15 years, I moved to Arizona where my love for abstract painting has deepened. Here the vivid warm colors of the Southwest infuse my art with new passion and imagination. Other influences over the years have been formal studies of music, photography and poetry, as well as travel and study in Paris and Florence. Favorite contemporary painters I admire are Wassily Kandinsky, Hans Hoffman and Helen Frankenthaler.

I am attracted to abstract painting much like a jazz artist is attracted to improvisation -- here I can freely express imagination with unlimited possibilities, but always within form. When I begin a painting, I clear my mind to that inner place of quiet, the no-mind, where the unconscious has free reign. I look at the blank canvas, choose intense colors that speak to me, and with a large brush begin to move colors improvisationally across the canvas until lines, shapes and forms begin to emerge. Working with those images, but still allowing for accident, I develop them into a visually pleasing whole, always aware of composition and design. The process is unpredictable, ever-changing, a constant painting out, painting in, layering, starting again. I know the painting is finished when I step back and feel that delightful moment of "wow." The painting has come alive.

Part of the pleasure of abstract painting is sharing it with others. Everyone brings his or her own world to art. A dialogue of images, feelings, and ideas begins when you, the viewer, open to what you see on the canvas. Abstract painting accepts all interpretations. You are free in this world of possibilities, as was I, the painter. The final stage of the creative process begins with you. Enjoy the dialogue.