My current watercolor paintings seek to portray familiar animals, especially those essential to Maine’s farms and fisheries, from new perspectives. While I want my subjects to be recognizable, I minimize their environments, concentrate on negative space, and try to tread the line between realism and abstraction.  I am interested in how light, reflections and shadows capture gestures and animate interactions, and how integrating small glimpses of the environment portray individual roles in a larger drama.

I take my own source photos and create sketches on site for later studio work.  Vibrant mackerel fade immediately upon being removed from water, so I transfer them into a small aquarium in the bow of my boat and capture their iridescent shapes in that small, sunlit space before releasing them. Creating a photo library of alewives migrating up fish ladders while ospreys circle overhead, or notebook sketches in the middle of a sheep pasture, enables me to draw on those intimate, tactile experiences of place while I compose paintings.

After a 30-year career in life sciences education, I have reconnected with who I was as a nature-loving child: dwelling in that joyful, hyper-aware, process of discovery that accompanies sitting quite still and drawing or painting. By visually depicting the animals in front of me or the environment that surrounds me, I better my own understanding, and I hope my viewers will pause to look and learn along with me.