Drawing, painting, and creating things have been my passions since I could first make marks on walls. In the past twelve years, since the youngest of our three sons headed off to college, Coos Art Museum has helped me reclaim my creative inclinations. Starting in the fall of 2012, I began taking nearly every studio art class offered at the museum–including painting (watercolor, acrylic, and colored pencil), printmaking, and collage. In 2015, local artist and educator Pat Snyder offered a class called Experimental Drawing that changed my life. I took the class twice. Pat’s class set me free to mess around with all sorts of media and to create intuitively. I now rarely strive to produce realistic recognizable subjects. Most of my paintings are experimental and expressive, far more abstract than representational, and I could not be happier.
