Scioto River Rock Star
36×48″ unframed oil painting on .875″ gallery-wrapped canvas, 2024, $2350
I’m going through a rocks-in-the-water-with-shallow-fade phase and it’s so much fun. I was on location with a group of artist friends on the Scioto River in Columbus Ohio. It was a little bit windy and I was annoyed that my umbrella had the tendency to fly away. Finishing this piece in the studio was so much more zen.
Alum Creek Lagoon
36×48″ unframed oil painting on .875″ gallery-wrapped canvas, 2024, $2350
In Ohio we have a lot of khaki-colored water. Intellectually, brown water just sounds gross, but I’ve painted it many times and it can be truly glorious. I’m obsessed with capturing how water color changes near to far with patterns, surface movement, seeing underwater, shadows, and reflection. The backlit frisbee golf course peeking through the trees inspired this scene.
Water Under the Bridge
36×48″ unframed oil painting on .875″ gallery-wrapped canvas, 2024, $2350
I was interested in capturing what’s in and above the swamp water from a rowboat at Cypress Gardens, South Carolina. Right after me and my artist friend floated under the bridge, we headed for the dock. According to the dock worker, a momma gator swam right in front of our boat the entire way back. My buddy didn’t see her, neither did I. I was in the back. The previous day we were plein air painting from the banks, and there was a bench that was chained off right where I wanted to paint. I was tempted to ignore the chain since it didn’t make sense. I painted right up next to it instead. I later found out that momma gator was a territorial that day and hid underwater to rush out to scare any tourons who got to too close to her bench.
The Avenue
36×36″ unframed oil painting on .875″ gallery wrapped canvas. 2024. $1800
The mall used to be our go-to place for buying gifts, especially when we didn’t exactly know what we were looking for. Online shopping was the beginning of the end of mall shopping. Any malls that remain are sad reminders of what they used to be. They used to be the place to hang out.
The cool hangouts nowadays are little pockets of walkable communities popping up near where I live. They’re roughly the size of a suburban neighborhood and include high-rise apartments, specialty boutiques, restaurants with outdoor seating, common areas, and free parking garages. This one in Dublin, Ohio integrates historic buildings with new construction interconnected via brick, concrete and greenspace with a new footbridge over the river.
Bribing Sheep
36×36″ unframed oil painting on .875″ gallery-wrapped canvas. 2024. $1800
A flock of sheep becomes a fuzzy cloud with legs moving across the land. The sheep piled up in a sliver of shade cast by the barn on a sweltering hot day in August in the hills of Kentucky. The only way to get them in the sunshine was to bribe them with grain. Did you know that sheep squat when they tinkle?
Zoo Bear’s Grotto
36×36″ unframed oil painting on .875″ gallery-wrapped canvas. 2024. $1800
I can’t remember exactly when I went from being annoyed at children blocking the view of zoo animals to enjoying watching children experience them. I appreciate the aesthetics designers incorporate into zoo habitats and feel it’s an important part of the story to tell through my art. There’s a beautiful truth to be told about humans experiencing these wonderful animals in our own urban habitats.
The bear in this painting is from the Columbus Zoo
Zoo Bear Will See You Now
16×20″ pastel on UArt mounted board framed with 1″ stainless steel frame. 2023. $600
This is Brutus at the Columbus zoo. He and his brother are the largest brown bears in zoos in North America. He likes to nap in his den, but rose up to visit with this young boy.
Playground Bubble
12×16″ oil on panel in 1″ gray wood floater frame. 2022. $425
This painting finished in the Top 100 finalists of Plein Air Salon August 2022, and selected for Southwest Florida National Online Exhibition Fall 2022, and exhibited Fall 2023 at Bryn Du National exhibition.
When I was a kid, playgrounds consisted of gray, twisted metal structures. Sometimes we’d see color painted on wooden teeter-totters or merry-go-rounds. The ones we have now look a bit like a child’s fantasy, and when I first saw one, I wished I wasn’t grown up. Their bright chunks of plastic and ubiquitous presence will be a part of our zeitgeist. One thing that will never change is that kids are going to walk up a slide, climb, and see one another simply as children.
Lost in the Desert
24×24″ pastel on stained, sealed hardwood, framed using museum plex. 2022. $1500
This painting won the Bronze Award CLWAC exhibition at Salmagundi NYC 2022, Great Pastels award Great Lakes Pastel Society National Exhibition Fall 2022, Honorable Mention OAL exhibition Summer 2022, Juror-selected Zanesville Museum of Art Exhibition Summer 2022, Top 100 Finalist Plein Air Salon August 2022
Sometimes being lost can come down to a matter of opinion, I suppose. Gates Pass in Tucson is a little tricky to find. There isn’t a sign and it’s surrounded by Saguaro National Park (it’s massive). My husband Alan and I were scouting for location the day before a rendezvous with a group of other artists the next morning. Alan insists we weren’t actually lost because GPS—and he was driving. GPS led us to a random spot in the National Park that was obviously NOT Gates Pass. Running out of daylight and still not finding our destination had us both feeling quite peckish. But were it not for being lost in the desert, we would not have experienced this moment even more magical than our ultimate destination.
The Game Trail
24×24″ pasted on stained, sealed hardwood. 2023. $900
This painting won the People’s Choice Award Rosewood Arts Center Exhibition 2024.
I stopped in to visit this metro park (Glacier Ridge in Dublin Ohio) on my way home from the city to take pictures of the forest blanketed in snow. Looking at this reminds me of how very quiet it was that day. The forest is one of my favorite places for inspiration. I wonder if its because it reminds me of a sense of exploration I had as a child. Getting to go into the forest was always an adventure. It still is.
03/13/2025