Sea of Diatoms Microscopia 29 Collage

I’m a native Floridian educated in Switzerland & France with an emphasis on the visual arts, which have always been my greatest passion. With the exception of extensive art courses in Paris and New York and private tutelage in Miami, I’m basically self taught. In 2007 I studied privately with renowned Miami artist Lynne Golob Gelfman for six years . After relocating from Florida to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I retired from a career in interior design & fulfilled a life-long dream of painting full-time. Through Lynne’s influence I developed a visual vocabulary expressed in collage, ultimately yielding this series of microscopic organisms. For this series, the unseen life form is my muse & is central to this series of mixed media smalls, where I try to capture the feelings of wonderment I experienced while snorkeling in distant oceans, looking under a microscope or observing ecosystems of insects & plant life in my garden . The natural world & biodiversity are in a fragile & precarious state, threatened by environmental and human-induced stresses. The question persists: will these organisms become extinct? My hope, expressed in this body of work, is that they will not perish but instead restructure & transmute to accommodate a changing environment. These paintings are pure fantasy, an exploration into how these life forms may evolve & thrive & what they will ultimately look like. I often marry plant life, sea life or microscopic organisms to create a life form all my own where reality merges into fantasy, at first blush familiar but ultimately unrecognizable. I keep building layers to create an environment saturated with detail & depth, as if looking through a window into a strange & inexplicable world.