I reside in southern Vermont and often spend a few winter months in an old Airstream camper on a mesa in New Mexico. My first creative incarnation was as a novelist, memoirist, and professor of creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Hampshire College, and The University of New Mexico. After publishing eight books, I started painting and never looked back. If my writing tended toward the grittily realistic, painting has permitted me to transcend the strictly representational in favor of the emotional content of landscapes I’ve inhabited or imagined.

My initial arts education was in writing, as I received both a B.A. and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing. Over the past ten years I have studied oil painting privately and in classes and workshops with artists Rosemary Ladd, Charlie Hunter, Julia Jensen, Michelle Dunaway, Pam Ingalls, Mary Giammarino, Kate McGloughlin, and others. I have had solo shows at The Geary Gallery in Darien, CT, the Rubin Gallery of DHMC in Lebanon, NH and at The DaVallia Gallery in Chester, VT. My work has appeared in juried group shows in Vermont and New York.

Six months a year I row my 26’ long solo racing scull on a stretch of the Connecticut River running between Vermont and New Hampshire. The river – in all its seasons and permutations – often appears in my work. Painting and rowing are complementary: hard work, joy, and a sense of expansion from being immersed in the light and shapes of a real place I make my own through painting.

I frequently use cold wax medium mixed with oil paint because it increases luminosity and its thickness and malleability allow for scraping, scratching, and the overlay of colors and textures. Its very imprecision creates possibilities–directions I might not have intended, images unforeseen, paths I want to follow.