One day when I was about six years old, I was leafing through the pages of an art book when I came across a color reproduction of French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s painting, “Girl with a Watering Can”. In it, a young girl in a sapphire-blue dress, with a big red butterfly of a bow perched atop her head, stands on a beige path accented with soft pinks in a lovely garden of bright green grass framed by colorful flower borders. Intricate white lace trim decorates the girl’s dress and a column of buttons, like little white saucers, marches up and down the front of it. The picture, shimmering with radiant light, fascinated me. It was unlike anything I had ever seen.

Not too long thereafter, I accompanied my mother and aunt on a visit to the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, California. Viewing original paintings by master artists for the first time left me with a sense of having entered into a tantalizing new realm of experience.

Although my interest in art was awakened at a young age, making art occupied a back seat in my life for many years. During that time, I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts from Western Washington University. After that, I worked in the software industry. Upon starting a family, I embraced the opportunity to be a full-time homemaker. As my two children grew older, I began to devote more time to drawing and painting. I pursued studio art courses from excellent teachers at Bellevue College in Bellevue, WA and at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, WA. Some of those teachers were Pat DeCaro, Juliette Aristides, David Dwyer, Aron Hart and Valerie Collymore. Today, I practice art from my home studio near Seattle, Washington.