"I love painting animals! It is using nature’s’ designs-spots,stripes shapes and color patterns that are fun and challenging to recreate on canvas.
My style is representational and I paint in acrylics on canvas using photographs for reference."
My intention is to create drama using multiple layers of paint,saturated color,detail and heavy body mediums to create texture.
Because of recent conversations with friends and family about the beauty of ravens and their smart, fascinating behavior, it was my inspiration for painting this piece.
A Raven is symbolic in different ways for various cultures but ravens commonly represent intelligent survival, hope, on the precipice of change during difficult times and playfulness along the way. For some indigenous cultures ravens represent a spiritual connection.
This raven represents for me a liminal place of darkness and the light that follows.
I grew up in the Minneapolis area and graduated from Augsburg College. Following graduation my husband and I joined a government sponsored program called Teachers For East Africa and were sent to Kenya to a rural boys secondary school. I did volunteer work in the area with children suffering from malnutrition. We lived in Kenya for five years and grew to love the astonishing beauty of the wildlife, land and culture.
When we returned to Minnesota I attended graduate school for a Master’s Degree in Community Counseling at nearby NDSU. and then worked for over thirty years in clinics and schools and private practice in the region. For the final fourteen years I worked in the Counseling Center at Concordia College in Moorhead Minnesota.
After retiring I was able to devote time to painting and showing my art . I was very inspired at that time to paint African animals I had exhibits in cafes, galleries and businesses in the Fargo/Moorhead area. When I returned to Minneapolis to locate near my son and his family, I continued painting African wildlife and landscape pieces. I have had several collections shown at Gigi’s cafe in south Minneapolis and do individual commission pieces, including pet portraits. Recently I have turned my attention to wildlife in Minnesota.