Biography

Among my earliest memories are the landscapes that hung in our home. These were painted by my great grandfather Charles Harold Davis, an American Impressionist. I liked to lie on the floor as a child and look up at his pictures, daydreaming about growing up to be an artist too. I wanted to climb around on rocky hillsides and paint what I saw, as he did. As I got serious about painting in high school I was inspired by his loose brushwork and subdued palette.

A little later in art school, I became mesmerized by the Abstract Expressionists. Their big gestures and ideas were exciting, and opened doors of possibility. I was particularly drawn to the linear energy of Joan Mitchell’s paintings. My own work began to explore different degrees of realism and abstraction, with nature always the starting point.

The nature I knew and loved was along the NE coast and the mountains of New England. But a summer hiking trip in the mountains of British Columbia changed everything. It was immediately clear that these were not the rolling hills of Connecticut - it was wilderness on a grand scale! The mountains were steep, the trees were huge, and it seemed everywhere I looked white water rivers cascaded from glacial cirques. It felt like walking through a De Kooning painting. I was hooked. My husband and I began to make annual trips to the NW and soon bought a cabin in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. In 2006 we left New York City and moved to Seattle permanently. The rain forests and coastlines of the North West have been the source of my imagery ever since.

I am currently working on a series of paintings about the changeable light and weather of the Northwest coast.