I cannot remember when I wasn’t creating art. My mother, an artist and teacher, involved me in art from the moment I could hold a crayon. I was also influenced by my father, who designed and printed handmade books. Although I have experimented with many forms of art (serigraphy, wood cut, ceramics, jewelry making in silver), since the late 70s I have worked principally as a painter and maker of assemblages.
Most of my paintings are landscapes, usually from photographs that I have taken. Although I never tire of painting the seasons of the Midwest with their ever-changing colors, I have enjoyed some special painting opportunities abroad. My husband’s work took us to Scotland for three years in the 90s, where I worked almost daily on my painting skills. A few years later, I spent an extended period painting in Provence, the landscape of the Impressionists.
In the late 1960s, after seeing spectacular assemblages in Hall’s Department Store in Kansas City, I discovered a Louise Nevelson exhibit in Minneapolis and never looked back. I became an assemblage maker. I have used everything from the parts of an upright piano and a broken organ to rusted car parts found along the road. In recent years, I have been recycling everyday objects—soda cans, plastic milk containers, keys, discarded lumber, wire, fabric—to create assemblages that hang or are free standing.
I was trained as a painter at Carleton College (Northfield, MN). I have also taken art courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. I taught art in the elementary schools in Neenah and Madison, Wisconsin, and taught a group of university students in Randers, Denmark. My work has been exhibited in Dalkeith, Scotland, Thousand Oaks, California, and in Eau Claire, Hudson, Menomonie, Milwaukee, Wausau, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and in Northfield, Edina, and Hopkins, Minnesota. Luther/Mayo Hospital, Sacred Heart Hospital (both in Eau Claire), and 3M are among my corporate customers. My work is also in private collections.
