PATTERNS AND TONES

50 artists at Keystone Art Space will be opening their studios to the public next Saturday! It has always been enlightening for me to have people walk through a rather private space of creation. It never fails to inspire and excite me to see how others react to new work in progress. After the Altadena fires in January, I found myself gravitating towards crafting colorful paper collages which have brought beauty back into my world in the midst of chaos. In February, a friend of mine asked me to design a few backdrops for a play she was writing about Women in Science.  Abstract investigations of outer and inner space led me to more natural structures, some of which can be seen on my website . For the past 3 months, I have literaly jumped out of bed and headed straight to the studio to paint large pieces of paper in gouache. The physical act of cutting and gluing them into scenes from the desert of Morongo Valley or fashioning them into small vignettes of plants or flowers has become ...

Postcard Test No. 1   My lifelong facination with New England, and specifically Massachusetts, has lead me to my next art adventure. I  applied for and was granted an artist's resendency this July at the Nantucket Island School of Design and The Arts . I'm hoping the residency will help me explore my family history and to bring alive the many stories I've heard about summers on Nantucket.  As opposed to Ellis Island, my family came through Boston. They came from Morsasco , a small hillside town in the Province of Alessandria in the Italian Region of Piedmont, and settled in Cape Cod in 1914.   With such a short week long residency, I dedided to sketch landscapes and boats on postcard paper and send them to friends and family. The goal upon my return is to use these postcard sketches as a jumping point for making a series of 17 x 22"" gouache and graphite paintings. Here is a sample of a postcard sketch I made, inspired by Charles Green Shaw 's "Fi...