About Me
As a kid, I was often drawing, designing, painting junky furniture weird colors, making floor plans out of leaves in the backyard, throwing pots, or sewing huge triangles into old pants to make the biggest bellbottoms in seventh grade. Growing older, I became distanced from those idyllic, creative days and, like so many, went to college, had jobs, married, started a family, got involved with the community, took care of those I loved. For the last 10-15 years, I’ve redirected my energies to my visual passions of painting, multi-media work, and photography. Mostly photography! I thrive on travel, solo or with family or friends, and I always have a camera or two with me. Photography encourages me to seek a deeper “look” into cultures very different than my own, to make images that tell stories, and to share the boundless beauty of our world and the resilience of its people.
And then COVID-19 came along. The pandemic encouraged artists to look inward and closer to home for inspiration. I turned to learning new photographic skills in online classes, researching and collecting images of artists I admired, and reading publications about the visual arts.
Most rewarding to me was spending countless hours in my sister’s pool. The water was my additional shelter-at-home locale. I focused on a project I’d begun in 2018 of making still-life images of flowers that are not still at all because they are moving in water. I loved the distortion, the blur, the abstraction, the fracturing, the reflections both of the sky and of the underside of the surface of the water. Although I had a huge failure rate, I was constantly surprised and often delighted.
The resulting body of work, titled “Flower Disarrangement”, was first presented in COLORS: Hornsby Photography/Desaulniers Painting, an exhibit with longtime friend and fellow artist Connie Desaulniers. Connie’s eclectic and fanciful paintings juxtaposed with my watery/abstract floral photographs combined for a dynamic exhibit in the Spring of 2022 in Williamsburg, VA. We hope to schedule another dual exhibit in the coming years.
My photos have found their way into homes and offices across the US, as well as inclusion in the President’s Collection of Art at The College of William and Mary.