I arrived at painting late in life, through a mysterious process more like grace received than like a decision made. But of course there were also many decisions, seeking teachers, workshops, painting groups and finally a studio space to foster my painting practice.

I spend hour after hour lost in blue, wondering whether it's Prussian blue I'm after or is it really Payne's gray I want, or will a bit of white be just the thing that makes me say ah, it's finished.  Is the burnt orange way too thick in that corner? I must answer only to a visceral aesthetic, no other "reasons" make sense. I'm in the world of seeing not thinking, of silence not words. I love the painting one afternoon and hate it the next morning, and sometimes, happily, the other way around.

I imagine I want to paint only abstractly (and sometimes I do), but over and over I find myself painting the human form. Sooner or later, as the abstract marks build up on the canvas, the hint of a body calls to me, almost compels me. Michelangelo famously said, "The sculptor's hand can only break the spell to free the figures slumbering in the stone."
        
 I often feel a mysterious human figure, usually a woman, is slumbering in the canvas, emerging, receding, on a journey to an unknowable destination, searching for home, staring out a window. Is she coming or going? Hard to say. Only that she’s enroute to a place she needs to go. I must find her.