My journey as an artist probably started long before I became aware of it, as a child living in a very modest home in Northern Ontario where I was born in 1950.  My first conscious awareness that I had of a desire to create visual art didn't actually take place until I was in my early twenties.

It was 1972 and I was living and studying French in Provence and travelling when possible on a very modest budget to places like Italy and Spain.  And for the first time in my life I was seeing some of the world's major museums and art gallery collections. 

I couldn't get enough of it.

I distinctly remember the moment when I stood looking at a famous painter's work and somehow during that experience I went from being a passive viewer to wanting to try to paint something myself.  I knew with certainty that I would make an attempt and even more strongly, I felt a strange and inexplicable inner confidence that I could do this, in time and with much effort.

That one moment changed the direction of the rest of my life. I said: “Yes!” and not “No.”

In fact, I did start to sketch and draw the most rudimentary and everyday objects soon after, and when I got back to Canada I made a conscious decision to assemble a portfolio of work with which I could later apply to the Ontario College of Art (OCA, now known as OCAD ) in Toronto.

One year after returning to Canada,in the Spring of 1974, I applied as a mature student and was accepted into OCA for full-time studies in the Fine Arts programme.

My mentors at OCA included some notable Canadian artists including Aba Bayefsky, Tom LaPierre, Viktor Tinkl, and a colour theorist named Roger-Francois Thépot who was a contemporary of Victor Vasarely. Vasarely's geometric abstractions and colour field paintings are iconic in that European movement during the 1960s. Thépot's lessons in colour theory and the use of colour in painting remain for me a very solid ground.

​Not surprisingly, my first five years in painting and drawing focused on geometric compositions and an exploration of overlays and the simulation of transparencies using media like opaque gouache and acrylics.

My turn towards botanical painting and drawing and also landscape began over 30 years ago when we moved from Toronto to Carlisle, Ontario. The move was prompted by an apprenticeship with one of Canada's finest wood engravers, Gerard Brender à Brandis. This was a propitious meeting as he generously taught me many skills in his workshop and studio including making handmade paper from natural plant fibres and cotton rag, hand typesetting as it was done before the twentieth century, bookbinding, inking and printing his beautiful engravings of flowers using a Victorian Albion press. 

My partner Carl and I lived in the same home in Carlisle for nearly thirty years.  It was a bucolic place to live and work and I became an avid gardener with Carl.  Our first perennial bed began in the middle of an overgrown half acre of field behind our home.  In time, lawns and trees and flowering shrubs and perennial and vegetable beds followed. A water garden was added later when the house was renovated to include a new studio.  Our view was spectacular from the top of our glacial moraine and drumlin.  The rich soil allowed us to grow almost any flower the zone would permit. 

It followed naturally that I began to paint the canvases of our skies in South Central Ontario as well as the flowers I was tending in the garden.  Irises have a particular significance for me as my mother's name is Iris and it is one of the first plants I remember in our yard as a child.  The cutting for those blooms came from my grandmother's home on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Coincidentally, our Carlisle home was only a few minutes' drive from the wonderful Laking Iris Garden, part of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario.

In 1995, our garden was featured in an article in Fine Gardening magazine from the USA. Shortly after that the garden and my artwork were also featured on the television series Gardener’s Journal on HGTV.

I have held memberships in both The Botanical Artists of Canada and The American Society of Botanical Artists, as well as the Federation of Canadian Artists.

After Carl and I both retired from teaching careers, we decided to move westward to Vancouver Island in 2006.  We now live in Parksville in central Vancouver Island. 

I have enjoyed many new opportunities since we arrived here in Oceanside.  In the summer of 2008 I was a featured artist at The Chemainus Theatre and in 2009 I had another important show at The Old School House Arts Centre in Qualicum Beach.  I am planning another show in the Fall of 2010 at Knox United Church in Parksville.

Keep checking back and THANKS for visiting today.