"I knew I was an artist as far back as I can remember, even before I knew what the word meant. I created images with pencils, crayons and sometimes paint as I grew older. I remember spending time in the furniture sections of fancy department stores, studying the imported paintings on the walls. I told myself that someday I’d paint well enough to have my work hanging in places like that."
"I wasn’t a very good student through the years. My family moved a lot, and I changed schools often. I attended nineteen schools before graduating high school. My art teachers would show a special interest in me and assign me special projects to keep me challenged."
"After high school, I wanted to attend art school, but we were poor, and I didn’t want to put that kind of pressure on my parents, so I went to a community college instead. I took a lot of art courses and became very bored with it all because I’d already learned what I was now being taught. I stopped going to class and decided to go into the army. I thought about going to Viet Nam, but my mother was adamantly against it. Shortly after that, I got married and started a family. I was 21 years old."
"Throughout my young life, I had creative things going – painting, drawing and other things. One incident changed my life. My mother-in-law at the time brought me some scrap pine wood she’d found at the local dump. She encouraged me to do something creative with it. I bought a wood burning kit at the local toy store and began to burn nautical images on the wood. I sold them to local shops and eventually sold them at some arts and crafts shows."
"But painting was always on a back burner. I’d paint a few paintings every year and give them as gifts to friends and family. I finally worked up enough courage to display them at some of my art shows. I was so excited when people would actually pay for one of my paintings to hang in their homes."
"Other than my school lessons, I’ve never had any formal training as a painter. Once, when I was raising my young children, I thought of taking art classes with a local artist. Another artist discouraged me when she told me that I’d never develop my own style if I learned how to paint from that artist. So I did it on my own, reading as many magazines and studying other artists’ work and their approaches to their paintings as I could."
"I painted in different mediums, but was always attracted most by oils because of their slow drying and the different textures I could get from them. I still remember my first oil painting. I was 15 years old and used my babysitting money to buy a canvas board, three brushes and three tubes of oil paint – blue, brown and green. I created a painting, using linseed oil to thin the paint and get different shades and values. I used so much oil that overnight the entire painting ran down to the bottom of the canvas. In a nutshell, I’m a self-taught artist."
"Today, if I’m not painting, I’m working in my garden. I love nature and the outdoors. I’m a birder and enjoy watching birds. I paint many of them in their natural environments. Often, while painting, I listen to recordings of bird calls. It’s relaxing and helps me concentrate on my work."
"Whenever I travel, I’m observing the different colors in the landscape from one region to the next. I also watch the light at different times of the day and how it affects trees, flowers and even hillsides and buildings. To me, it’s all so beautiful, and I want to capture all of it with paint on canvas. If just one person sees what I see when I create a painting, it’s all been worth it."
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