I was born in Lexington Kentucky but my family was neither from there, nor did we stay there. I grew up in North Carolina. My mother was from Long Island, my father from rural southern Georgia. We ended up living in the eastern seaboard. A middle of sorts.

My first studio class was with James Gadson at UNC, who thankfully exhorted everyone in that summer morning drawing class that a drawing of a chair is not a chair. It is all abstract.

James encouraged me to take classes with Martha Zelt during my senior year at Guilford College, which I did. Martie in turn encouraged me to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I applied, was accepted for study, and moved from the Piedmont of North Carolina to Center City, Philadelphia.

I drove my Ford Falcon to Center City, lived on the first floor of an in-process rehab with an artist landlord and worked my way through the Academy program. The month I got my certificate from the Academy, I found a loft to rent on Jeweler's Row and started my career as a waitress, bartender and artist. Lived for nearly a decade in that wonderful loft and then came back to the Piedmont of NC when the owner of the loft sold the building and my rent doubled.

It broke my heart to leave Philly but by moving back to NC I was responding to a growing need: around this time I was painting a lot of landscapes and I wanted more access to open spaces and vistas. The first year that I moved back my studio was located in a field on a dairy farm outside of Chapel Hill. It was a strange year of loneliness and ecstasy - missing my Philadelphia friends but working directly from the landscape in my paintings, rather than imagining such. Typesetting and and then title research would become means of income and means to continue my studio work.

Eventually my painting focus would shift - from external landforms to to an inner geography, always checking in and finding markers which become paintings.

Everything I have said is true, but this is not a bio.