My art is not about anything happy.  It is not beautiful.  It is not a cartoon.  It is documentation of: a poor child, a "new kid", a woman, a nomad, a smoker, a painter.  It is fragments of memory and personal relationships.  It makes sense to me.  It helps me understand people.  It is how I process emotional situations.  It is not therapy but process. When I hear something awful has happened, or am angry with someone, or sad about life, that is when my paintings become real.  It is a narration of abstraction in life, in beliefs and in relationships.  First I will discuss my life history that led me to become an artist, then my painting process and how it evolved during my three years in graduate school and finally the major artistic influences which have shaped my work.