About Me

I am a life-long artist with a 25-year career in the high-end fashion industry in Toronto as a designer and pattern drafter. My focus returned once again to visual art in 2004, delving deeper into fine art photography and painting. I work primarily in encaustic, cold wax medium with oil, and acrylics. I have participated in many juried group and solo exhibitions, arts festivals, and fundraising events including at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Dundas Valley School of Art, DVSA Gallery, McMaster Innovation Park’s Art in the Workplace, Hamilton Public Library galleries, the Fieldcote Museum and the Louvre in Paris, France. My award-winning work hangs in collections in North America, France, Australia, New Zealand,  Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Encaustic painting

With encaustics, I love mixing the molten beeswax with damar resin crystals, sap from
trees in Malaysia and Indonesia. Then mixing that medium with different pigments to
create palettes from which to work. Every layer is laid down with hog-hair brushes and
fused to the previous layer with the fire of a blowtorch. I build layer upon layer of
translucent and opaque colours. Carving into the piece with sculpting tools, I add
and remove wax, scraping away layers to reveal previous ones. The act of, and
methods used in, art-making with this 2500+ year-old technique is something more of
a journey in itself as it morphs from one direction to the next. Going with the flow and
reacting to the changes as they occur is such a peaceful, addictive process.

Digital

My very first foray into digital art in the early 1990s was exciting. No brushes to clean, never running out of expensive paints and supplies, no studio to clean up. It was fantastic. And even though after many years I yearned to get my hands dirty again in the studio, digital art is something I continue to enjoy. As an experienced fine art photographer and post-processor, and a total long-time geek, digital art is still a medium I enjoy.