I was fortunate to grow up in New York City with a world of great art easily accessible. As a teenager I studied at the Art Students League and spent my free time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Museum. Summers offered a different and equally compelling world. For ten weeks every summer my family lived in a small Adirondack cabin. There were few organized activities and from a very early age I was free to roam woods and rural lanes collecting plant specimens and learning their names.
This duality of city and country has continued to enrich my life. I lived for many years in the Bay Area where I earned my MFA at UC Berkeley and spent a decade working at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens. For three years I lived in the rural outskirts of Pune, India absorbing a new landscape and studying Indian miniature paintings.
I now live in rural Vermont and, as life would have it, spend little time painting what is right outside my studio. But, of course, everything is in there someplace!