Artist's Statement:

Art has always been a part of my journey. My mother is an artist, and when I was younger, my best friend was an artist. I never wanted to draw or paint because I always felt as if I didn't want to compete with them. I never thought of myself as a painter. Now my best friend lives in New York and works in business, having given up art ten years ago; and I am the artist.

When I was seventeen years old, I left home and went to Vassar College to pursue an English Major. I found myself drawing and painting in my room late at night and becoming more and more interested in art. I was liberated from measuring myself up to the work of others, and I began to develop my own style. By my junior year, I decided to study abroad in France and I dedicated myself completely to art. I took life-drawing and painting classes at L'Ecole des Beaux Arts, and a drawing class at Sorbonne. It was an incredible experience for me. When I returned to Vassar, I was able to audit two painting classes during my senior year and even exhibit some of my work.

Upon graduating, I returned to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting and music, but found myself continually drawn back to painting and began taking a life drawing workshop and painting in my small studio apartment.

When I paint, I find tranquility in the concentration and the experience of painting. I find great solace in whatever lies within my imagination. Even the act of putting colors onto the palette, smelling the paint, and dipping my brush into the water, quiets my mind. The vibrant colors and the textures produce an energy, a vitality, that I haven't found elsewhere. As I paint, I find myself slowing shifting and then settling into the work, developing a trust in my brush. George Tooker once said: "Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life." I agree with him; painting is an expression of the artist as well as the subject. We cannot separate who we are from our creations. Art has been the only thing I've ever found that distinguishes me in this vas universe, that gives me a reason to rise each morning with a sense of purpose. Sometimes I paint to let go, sometimes to tell a story that needs to be told, to find compassion or love, or to mourn a loss; but once it is created with paint, I am freed from it because art heals.