About me

As a lifelong learner, I am in love with the human capacity for curiosity and wonder. How have we interpreted our world through languages and the senses? How do we communicate what we see with others? And what does all this beauty and ugliness mean? With a paintbrush in hand, I ponder these puzzles of human life and play with our drive to keep learning and be creative.

As a painter, I am a studied realist, especially when I work with people from observation, but the spaces around people are another story. Here cultures, art history, and interior contemplation interact with my subject in intuitive ways. Sometimes I convey classical three-dimensional depth; sometimes I combine different ways of looking at space to evoke imagination and the interior life.

I grew up in Texas and now live in Maryland with my husband, portrait photographer Joe Portolano. Together we have six grown daughters — five of them adopted internationally from Ukraine — and an ever-growing tribe of interesting and loveable grandchildren who sometimes pose for portraits in our home studio.

For the first half of my life, I was a writer. I drew and kept nature journals in my spare time and never imagined art could be my daily vocation. In my career as a humanities professor, I wrote academic works on subjects ranging from public speaking to poetry, but the capstone of this career was a seven-year research project about the religious traditions of deaf people. I was surprised to find that life in this visual culture changed my identity as a communicator. You might say that thinking deeply about the souls of deaf people flipped a switch in my brain. My sensitivity to visual communication expanded, and all the time I once spent writing is now devoted to making art.