The early workshops for painting and drawing gradually led to having my work in competitions and exhibits , selling a few now and then . After landing a position on the nursing faculty at University of New Mexico I studied for a MA and PhD in cultural anthropology . This might seem like a strange bedfellow for someone wanting to be an artist who ’ s working as a nursing instructor . However the eye opening really began to happen in this mixture of the disparate . Hearing about the vision of others looking at the world and experiencing their world with them gave me pause to re-examine my own world . My word , there is much more here to be appreciated .
All these facets of my life continue to grow and change but always influencing my art and my approach to art . I love the mystery of warmth and gentleness , the subtle touch of softness and texture , the information we cannot see but feel so deeply . I imagine how to describe those things to a blind person or even to myself . My way of expressing such beautiful things is the way I approach my paintings .
There is a sequence in my approach that led me to work in encaustic . There were line drawings , then inked lines alone or sometimes included in collage paintings . Each new moment built on earlier creations and findings . Creating unconventional , informal figures in torn paper and line work was exciting . I was not prepared for what came next . Out of the blue , a stranger walked into the gallery and asked if anyone there did encaustic . She was leaving town and wasn ’ t going to take this huge box of supplies with her . She gave them to me and left . I didn ’ t even get her name . I knew that Ellen Koment taught encaustic painting in Santa Fe so it seemed natural that I enroll and put this lifetime supply of materials and equipment to good use . When I enrolled in a series of encaustic art workshops with Ellen Koment I couldn ’ t believe how much new wonder appeared before me . The first couple of efforts were non-representational abstractions similar in style to my oil painted abstracts . Later , figures began appearing as with The Wise Old Man who just developed without my intention . So emboldened , I used a line drawing I had made of two Sisters and adapted it to encaustic . It was fresh , impressionistic appealing and simple . They did not have faces or much detail but their body language carried the message to engage the viewer .