Nature's Heartbeat Painting

I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I moved to San Francisco at sixteen and never looked back. I have always had a passion for art and a need to create. Throughout my life, I was always taking classes or workshops in whatever medium intrigued me, while working full time. I was a self-employed craftsperson in the Bay Area in the 1970s. In 1980, my husband and I started Mishi Apparel, a natural fiber clothing company for women. I was the designer, retail manager, and vice-president for 20 years. Getting breast cancer in 1997 was a turning point in my life. I left the business and moved into my first full-time art studio. I began to paint in watercolors, wanting to share the beauty I saw in the local landscape. I am fascinated by the natural world and the relationship between nature and man. In my painting, I share my inner feelings and thoughts about the art of living on Earth. After working in watercolor for twelve years, I started feeling limited by the medium. Watercolor required left-brain thought and planning, but I wanted to work more intuitively. I was interested in expressing my ideas and thoughts rather than what I was seeing and feeling. I started working with acrylic paints and mediums, creating layers of paint and carving into them to expose the under-painting. This new body of work was still a reflection on the natural world, but it was much more abstract. I now share a studio in The Art Hatchery, a historic brick chicken hatchery built in 1906, which has been converted into artist studios. My newest series is entitled “Water’s Edge”, reflecting my childhood spent by the ocean and my current experience of drought in California. Water is, actually, the essence of life on Earth.