About 2021
I'm an artist living (about half the year) in Portland, Oregon.
I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, and moved to Southern California when I was 5 years old. I took one photography class as a freshman high school and got someone else to develop my film for me because I was afraid I'd mess it up. When I was 22, I built my own darkroom in the garage of a house I was renting and decided to give the photography thing another go. I taught myself a bunch of stuff and hung out at the local photography store asking tons of questions, but eventually took up painting instead.
In 1995 I moved from my downtown Los Angeles loft to Portland, Oregon to go back to school and in 1999 I finished a BFA in Painting and Drawing. After a short but fun and fairly successful foray into the painting and gallery scene in Portland, I eventually returned to photography and converted my painting studio into a photography studio. I really did love the smell of linseed oil and turpentine, but I missed working with people.
I shoot digitally and I do all my own retouching which makes the whole photography process feel a lot like painting to me. Recently I've started hand stitching on my own photographs as a way to bring my hand back into my personal work. I spend about half the year traveling with my husband Kevin in our Nordic Tug (a power boat) up the Inside Passage to Alaska and back as part of a side business we created called Slowboat. You can follow our travel blog here if you're interested: Slowboat
Oh yeah, and my mom's horse was once in an Elvis movie.