I was born in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1961. I lived nearby in a little town called Ashuelot. Every weekday, I walked across the century-old Ashuelot Covered Bridge on my way to the four-room schoolhouse. But then when I was nine, my family moved to South Glens Falls, New York, in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.

Since I was a young girl, I've enjoyed drawing, especially drawing people. But in my twenties I became interested in photography, and that in turn sparked a curiosity of how those photos would look if they were paintings instead. But pure transcription into paint was not what I had in mind. I had become an admirer of Vincent van Gogh and was drawn to the way he transformed the ordinary scenes and people he encountered into moving pieces of art, a world full of pathos and passion, a transfigured world. Yet I wanted to do something different, but that was my starting point.

I considered returning to college to a get a degree in studio art. I took drawing courses at a few colleges and currently take life drawing classes at the Art Students League "atelier" program in New York City. But in the end I decided against pursuing a formal degree. I wanted to learn how to paint but thought I could learn on my own. I wanted to rely on my own instincts and let my style grow naturally. I wanted my paintings to come from me. So, with eleven years of self study under my belt, I am, for the most part, a self-taught painter.

A fellow artist told me not long ago that my paintings displayed a narrative quality that many artists spend years searching for and never find. The people in my paintings tell me stories about themselves. Once a photo captures my attention, the people depicted and their surroundings begin to speak to me in an unspoken language that is then filtered through me onto the canvas, though without conscious thought. This is where the narrative quality transforms what I originally saw in the photo into something completely new and different. As I fill the canvas with color, my subjects come to life. They now exist in the purely aesthetic world we have created. Even in my paintings where people are nowhere to be found, their presence can be sensed.