As I grew from the girl that I was towards the woman I became, I also grew intimate with my earth environment.  I recall the earthy scent of wet cedar bark and sage after summer rains renewed moisture to the dessert soil. Somewhere in the chorus of my memories of my first home, I sometimes hear the vibrato songs of locusts resounding through the fields just before autumn.  I remember also, that my eyes would drink in the patterns of light and color that were part of the changing environmental phenomena that manifested around me.  The natural world was part of my daily experience and became the primary inspiration for my art.

Through my experiences with nature I gained an awareness that awakened me to the beauty of the American wilderness.  Such beauty exists where terre firma rises in rugged, granite formations, pushing its solidity upwards--at points, over ten thousand feet above sea level--towards the heavens.  This length of spine of the Rocky Mountains, the entirety of its peaked and canyoned mass, stretches laterally for approximately three-hundred miles across the land.  These mountains live as a major horizon within my imagination.

I have found an intimate connection with native earth and sky, and creatively responded to the manner that my physical senses percieve the phenomenal field of animate earth.  The paintings that comprise my American Wilderness series are rooted in the beauty of the land.  Each of these works shows, in part, my reverence for the home that sustains my body and inspires my spirit.