As a thirty-plus year career teacher, my art has been inspired by my students’ fascination for what their teacher paints or draws for them. I often look back at how my teaching and art have traveled side-by-side, as well as how my art has evolved through the years. As a youth living in Upper Michigan, my family raised, trained, and showed horses in multiple competition formats. I remember drawing horses endlessly during this period of my life. When I entered the elementary classroom as a credentialed teacher, my horse drawings, using chalk pastels, became very popular. I would bring in one or two pieces a month and raffle them off for my students to take home. Over the course of over thirty years in the classrooms, I have given away hundreds of not only horse drawings, but of other animals as well. More recently I have donated my art to my schools’ auction fundraisers and have raised over $20,000 to support invaluable educational programs.
In recent years I have been inspired by the traditional Chinese and Japanese -style paintings by accomplished masters. I am drawn to the strokes of the brush to capture the culture and artistic energy of traditional Chinese and Japanese painting. It has been and will continue to be an endless journey to capture this style of painting, while infusing my own style as well. The artist’s marks — or red-ink stamps — shown on my paintings have been specifically and personally carved for me by an elderly Chinese master carver I tracked-down in a small basement shop in Chinatown in San Francisco. All the materials I use to paint are in the traditional manner —- brushes, ink, other materials —- that are mostly used by the masters. Again, my inspiration comes from my students and how my paintings and drawings have inspired a love of art in them. Maybe they will, one day, find an artistic journey such as I have.
