Statement

I use the techniques of traditional representational still life painting to explore contemporary issues that are also personally significant to me. Once the initial concept is chosen, my process involves researching appropriate elements, gathering materials, arranging them into visual metaphors and doing principal source photography. After the initial drawing is completed using a grid transfer, each painting takes anywhere from two weeks to six months, depending upon size and complexity. I prefer to work in a series, like the chapters of a book, with breaks to explore intuitive left turns and follow my fancy.

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Biography

• I was conceived in a boarding house, which was razed when they built the Atlanta Fulton County Stadium. The commemorative second base marker in the parking lot of Turner Field is the site of my conception.
• My most thrilling childhood memory - riding horseback before a big storm, wind gusting hot and cold, galloping flat out back to the barn and making it just as the rain exploded.
• My grandfather was Atlanta's Fire Chief during the depression. I always put a dollar in the boot.
• I attended W.F. Dykes high school. It was a more innocent time. I did not grasp the reason for the inquiring eyebrow tilts until I was in my mid-twenties.
• I went to summer school at the Marion Military Institute when I was fifteen.
• I ended up in first televised Model of the Year contest, produced by the Stewart Agency in 1967, on the strength of a Polaroid. I lied about my age.
• Living on a commune in Sausalito in 1968, I learned to cook brown rice and read a lot of pseudo-mystical books.
• I was a standard issue hippie chick (see Forrest Gump). No, I was not at Woodstock. I had long straight hair, wore beads, and if I dated you, you were 'my old man.' Je ne regrette rien.
• Discovered for the second time in the Parisian nightclub Regines by Fernando Casablancas, I landed a print job with French Vogue on my second audition. A total fluke. I worked in London, Paris, Milan, and Hamburg for the next six years with international photographers at the top of their game. The experience of spending my workday saturated in directed, measured and manipulated light, observing compositions framed in the lens, has had a strong influence on my art making process.
• In my one and only film appearance, I played a maiden rescued by Robert Plant. Who knew the Internet would extend the movie's shelf life from a couple of years to eternity? In the age of YouTube, The Song really does Remains the Same.
• When I walked around an abandoned Glaoui palace in Ouarzazate, the storks nesting in the corners of the battlements clattered their beaks when I got too close.
• My apartment in NYC was one room with a loft on the Upper West side across from a Yeshiva. I remember Zabar's and the Cloisters fondly. Being mugged, not so much.
• The last words my mother said to me before she died were, "Hello Sugar."
• I studied Russian Literature at Oglethorpe College with the idea of transitioning from model to author.
• I've been married to Robert Kempf since 1982. He is a Key Grip by profession and a man among men.
• I became the Swiss Army knife of freelance writers. I also wrote two novels, long on description and ornate language. Unpublished. Ten years ago, while working on a third novel, I took a drawing class.
• Drawing is a gateway drug, which leads very quickly to acrylic and ultimately the hard stuff - oils.
• My three children Emily, Robin and Parker, are my proudest accomplishment. And they did most of the heavy lifting. I shamelessly dote on them.
• I have a family plot in Oakland Cemetery, cata-cornered from Mrs. John Marsh.
• I swapped cigarettes for needles in 1979. I am what they call a freestyle knitter. Need a baby hat?
• My favorite time of day is 7:30 am.