is an Irish name and, before it was mine, it was given to the paternal aunt I was named after. We had a strong connection and, even though we lived in different provinces, we’d sometimes be thinking of each other, or of the same thing, at the exact same moment. She called it “our psychic bond”. This felt like personal magic to me; like something other-worldly that belonged only to the two of us.

Magic was, in fact, all around.

The sixties and seventies, when I was a child, was a time of pushing boundaries, social experimentation and high interest in the metaphysical. We dabbled in religion and majored in spirituality. Love. Self-actualization. Freedom… I was too young to be an influential part of the Counterculture but I could not help but be imprinted with the ideals.

As I ponder the people, places and things that have influenced my art process and painting style—and the resultant quirky life-forms which are merely reflective of the Natural world—I wander further back in time to another “ant”…a very specific black ant…one that I had held captive within my pre-school arms on a summer sidewalk outside our house. I can’t tell you why I did that except that I was curious and interested in making some kind of connection. As I watched it zig-zag across the sidewalk in my arm-fortress, I repeatedly blocked its attempts to crawl free. Until it bit me.

“Come forth into the light of things, let Nature be your teacher.”
William Wordsworth

The bite I sustained that sunny day gave me this insight: a creature very different from me—crawly and quiet and many times smaller—had, like me, a mind and a will of its own. Like me, it didn’t want to be kept from its natural world. This was clearly communicated when it attacked. I was a little shocked, yet understood. I was also quiet and small. And there were many early mornings in those early years that I crawled out the bedroom window to wander, discover and simply be inside the magical world outside. Those daybreak adventures ended after a neighbour put me to bed with her own children, and my mother then made a nightly ritual of putting a butter knife in the porch doorjamb to keep her young daughter safe inside.

Safe. Inside.

It’s where I learned to experience magic another way…by making art.

This unspoken but powerful learning moment (to be repeated in various ways throughout my childhood), along with the things I absorbed from parents who modelled respectful curiosity of other beings—including the flora and fauna—has had lifelong impact on my sensibilities, my life pursuits and my art.

“One does not impose one’s will on a space. One listens.”
Louis Kahn

An Intuitive Process Artist, my approach is to focus inward and on my painting surface as I layer colour, line and texture; shaping, building whatever the evolving painting seems to suggest. This intuitive, interactive process fosters the surreal biomorphic style that dominates the majority of my paintings to date.

Sometimes I sense the relationship of the found (vs. contrived) shapes and life forms that appear, to things I value deeply: self-determination, connection, discovery…personal magic… Occasionally the paintings release memories. Often they relay mood, emotion and personality. Almost always they are saturated with colour and are becoming increasingly more textured.

And every now and then, some small part of a painting feels particularly suited to pattern-making.

When the time is right, I take my organic art into the digital realm to design Surface Patterns which I use to produce fashion accessories. These are then distributed, in limited quantities, to retail outlets (new outlets and web-sale system coming soon).

All of my digital designs are created—bit-by-tiny-bit—by me and my very human brain, sometimes resulting in hundreds of files before a particular version reaches your eyes. An award-winning graduate of Media Production, I also create the product photos, written content and old-school videos on this website.