In Family Stories I crossed the threshold of the home and entered the private world that shapes the life of the indwelling family and its search for cultural authenticity, identity, and beauty in the ordinary places of life. Permeating Family Stories are references to popular American culture, including abstract panels based on the myriad patterns found in the home.

These ordinary, yet complex and intimate patterns have inspired a body of paintings called The Home & Garden Series. In Home & Garden I explore the familiar designs of everyday functional and decorative objects, textiles and surfaces, and fragile arrangements of forms so often unnoticed or eclipsed by our media-driven lives in twenty-first century American culture.

In Home & Garden I examine and reassemble not only patterns within the home, but also forms within nature and the cultivated family garden. These designs include the most overlooked—from the folds of a curtain to rain in the dust, from a papered wall to veins in a leaf, from the checkered tablecloth to shadows on a stone walk, from the well-worn carpet to moss between old bricks—among countless others. In the paintings of Home & Garden, I attempt to construct a form of “pattern language” that gives visual voice to beauty within the ordinary.

The colors, textures, and tonal configurations of Home & Garden are influenced additionally by memories of the domestic landscape of my childhood, particularly of the changing seasons and dramatic terrain of rural California, Idaho, and Montana.

The Home & Garden paintings are site specific and may be reconfigured into single-panel, diptych, triptych, or multi-panel installations. The work is created in mixed materials on canvas, panel, and paper and ranges in size from 18 x 6 inches to 42 x 63 inches.

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