About Me
My Background
According to my kindergarten teacher and mother, I have been drawing full-formed humans with hands, fingernails, and expressive details like eye-brows and eye-lashes since I could hold a pencil. The day I was born, my grandmother bought a set of oil paints and saved them for me until I was old enough to use them. Between Grandma Ruby's prophetic gift, growing up designing and building things in my grandfather's wood shop, and my instinctual love of beauty and creation, God destined me to become an artist. With my mother's inspiration as a music teacher and my love for children, it seemed equally natural to translate my creative gifts into my calling as a teacher.
My Medium
Although I am well-versed in a variety of mediums, oil painting and drawing are my specialties. Over the years I have learned and taught: ceramic hand-building, watercolor, printmaking, pen and ink, charcoal, wood burnishing, intro photography, 3-D craft and design, and digital art. I love nature, color, God and His word in scripture, music, cinema, and poetry. Much of my work is informed by my faith and the female experience.
My Inspiration
In my painting series for which I earned Honors in Oil Painting at Wake Forest University, I created a series of a little girl playing with an egg to represent different phases in a woman's life. In my twenties, I was inspired by rereading Exodus and became fascinated by God's theophany in fire. Fire can be warmth, light, beauty, and comfort; fire can also be consuming, dangerous and beyond our control. I searched for more fire references in scripture: "refiner's fire," John the Baptist announcing that "He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire," and "tongues of fire" at Pentacost. In my fire series, I explored these different references as well as development in my own walk of faith. My grandfather was a carpenter and my father is a surgeon, so crafting things with my hands and studying anatomy to learn the intricacies of God's amazing design of the human body seems to be in my blood. From portrait commissions to visions from God, I tend to view the world through the human body and see echoes of God's creation in the human form. In my recent series, I've been considering how God's design in nature may have metaphors within the human anatomy. My first piece is a "Heart cocoon" on a winter "skeletal tree." As in poetry, I seek to find the confluence between two images where a beautiful metaphor lives. As in the drawing on the left inspired by Proverbs 4:23, "Guard your heart, for it is the well-spring of life," the human heart and the human eye interact as one. The inner self, from within the pupil-heart, draws a boundary line to create the iris of the eye; the soul guards the heart by defining the filter through which she perceives truth from lies, darkness from light, and lives in full-colored life in light of the Gospel ("I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." John 10:10).