What's My Story?

As a child, I enjoyed drawing and colouring. It was a sure-fire way to entertain myself. What can I say? It was just fun. I could spend hours doing doodle-art with my best friend. I saw artists working on location in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, and thought, “That. That’s what I want to do.”

In my teens, I discovered that when I did observational drawings from life, I could see, really see, and it was an immense thrill to get something realistic down on paper. I was hooked.

My artistic yearnings took a back-seat to a career in medicine. After spending a good portion of first year medical school with a cadaver, I took a Life Drawing course. It was so healing to appreciate the living human form.

As I settled into Family Practice and raising two sons, I was able to steal away to community art courses and retreats. I love capturing emotions in the human figure and portraiture, especially with charcoal and more recently with acrylic and oil paints.

While it was a privilege to share in the lives of patients for 20 years, and to enjoy many years of small group teaching at the local medical school, I became increasingly drawn to my art. This, and various health conditions, led me to suspend my clinical practice in the spring of 2014. No matter how bad my health and moods, my studio is a piece (peace?) of heaven for me, and creative friends who join me there.

I continued my part-time teaching at the medical school for a few more years, and was accepted into Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD - now AUArts) in the spring of 2015.

My main artistic media are classical materials – charcoal, pencil and painting. I love the tactile sensations of charcoal – I feel like I am sculpting the figure in front of me. And oh the joy of oil paints magically blending, as if the canvas paints itself!

My style and process are to start with that seeing and attempting to depict the subject realistically. I explore the techniques of the Old Masters. Then I am free to draw from the Romantics, the Impressionists and beyond - loose, abstract, expressive. The work becomes something better than, different from, expressing something indefinable beyond, the starting point – that is success to me.

On the surface, my subjects tend to be portraits, human figure, special locations, plant life – but these are simply objects, starting points. My true subjects are emotion, spirituality and essence. I always hope to add something magical to the image, not just reproduce it.

I have begun to experiment in the fibre arena. I enjoy the tactile sensation of natural fibres (gorgeous cotton, silks, wools!) and the meditative state associated with weaving, knitting and paper-making. I am fascinated with illuminated manuscripts and books of hours. If I could time-travel I would be a monk in a scriptorium.