Art always has a problem, an analysis, and a conclusion. The conclusion then becomes the next problem.

At the age of 46, I went back to school to follow another interest, and received a Master’s degree in Dance / Movement Therapy from Antioch University.  During those three years of study, I re-discovered an old love of dance, and a new respect for the power of movement as a therapeutic tool. I found work in a Waldorf School as a remedial movement educator. 

But during those years of study I also found another “voice”—a writing voice—which, for a number of years, took priority over drawing and painting. I joined a writing group, led by Genie Zeiger in Shelburne, MA, and moved to the Pioneer Valley in 2005. 

My interest in image-making was re-awakened by the arrival of one of my daughters in 2011, who transformed my dining room table to a collage-making space.  Watching her make “marriages” of her writing and colored papers was irresistible.  

Now, I seem to move between all of these worlds—drawing and painting portraits, making collages, and continuing to consult as a movement educator with several Waldorf Schools in New England. 

I came to art-making in my forties, as a direct result of having received a book called The Zen of Seeing, written by Frederick Franck, a Dutch-American artist.  My friend, a printmaker, had just returned from a day-long workshop with the artist. I still remember the particular words that caught my attention in the text, words that made me think, “I can do this. I want to do this.” Franck described the act of drawing as using the drawing pencil (as if ) to “caress” the model, and to imagine the paper as simply receiving those caressing marks. The eye, Franck maintained, will guide the pencil, if the eye is a loving one.

My first drawing after devouring the book was of a simple #2 pencil, and it took me an hour and a half to get it “right.” I was exhausted, but exhilarated by the results.  And yes, I had fallen in love with the pencil.  I framed that first drawing as a memory of that amazing beginning.

I continued to draw on my own, then took a six-week watercolor portraiture class with Phoebe Flory in New Hampshire, and a course in life-drawing at the Sharon Arts Center in Sharon, N.H.  I acquired a studio in an old mill building in Wilton, N.H., began to hire models to pose, entered shows, and began to sell some of my work.

Over the next five years I met other artists in the Riverview Mill, and felt supported and encouraged in that community. When I felt stuck, I talked to them, and looked at their work. I took classes, traveling to New York for a week-long portraiture class, to the deCordova museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts  for a landscape drawing class, to Maine for a week of plein air painting with Albert Handell. And of course, I bought art books and went to art exhibits.