About my work
I’ve always been fascinated by place and impermanence. I’m not sure if that’s because by the time I was two, I’d lived in three states. Or because my grandparents were very old—old enough to be my great grandparents. Before I had a language for it, I became fixated by things being here today and gone tomorrow. I could look out over a vast desert landscape one day, and seemingly the next day find myself looking out over an ocean. I didn’t want them to be gone, and I wanted to remember them even when I was as old as my grandparents. So, I played a game with myself that my mind was a camera, that I could mentally absorb everything about a scene, the look of it, the scent of it, and also the feel of it, so that I could pull it out as if I were there all over again.
In my middle years, when I was a young wife and mother, there were so many precious moments and special days that I wished I could preserve, like the summer pears I canned. Gathered along the delta orchards near my home. To pull them out to enjoy when the days got darker and a bit gloomy. We all have those days. Those moments when your children were babies and so joyful, next to those days when they were teens and trying to find their own way. I played my game with those moments, too. Before my kids flew the coop, I took photos of them at their grumpiest, just so I could remember when I started missing them too much.
I’m an old woman now, and I still play this game. But now I’m more on the retrieval end of things. I reconstruct what I’ve seen with all of the memories of place my life has given me. A glance through a café window with a woman pouring coffee. A woman watering her horses along the Sacramento River. A tiny train station on a dark winter night. The different look and feel of a copse of trees by the Puget Sound as seasons change. My children when they were young, my nieces and nephews. Those are the things I love to paint. Because the process of painting them lets me touch them again.
And so, my fascination for the landscape, the horizon, the changing light finds its way into my work. The moments I want to “re-member.” The animals that delight me and the ordinary sights of daily living. It isn’t the thing I paint, but the memory of the thing, through the lens of time.