Marion Art Center

“Like many women of her generation, my mother married directly after graduating from college and soon had five children to care for.  She had a husband who loved to sail, so in 1969 the family moved from a suburb of Boston to Marion.  She worked as a drug counselor in New Bedford, and for many years was guidance counselor at Sippican School in Marion.  At the same time, she began to pursue a love of painting more and more seriously.  She took classes at the Swain School in new Bedford and soon was driving up to Boston several times a week to paint with Joel Babb at the Museum School.  I remember my mother painting in the dining room of our house, spreading out a tarpaulin on the floor to protect the carpet, and swathed in a large paint-bespeckled green apron.  She produced seascapes and bathers lying on the beach.  She appreciated the odd, infinitely interesting proportions of bodies sprawled in sunshine.  She also loved the expanse of horizon, where the sea meets the sky. 

“Some time around 1986, my mother transferred her work to a studio that she’d had built behind the garage.  She began to take classes in printmaking at the South Shore Art Center and became interested in monotypes, partly for the techniques she wanted to master, and partly because in print making, there are some things that the artist cannot control, so there is a sense of discovery and delight –or despair—as the run is made and the sheet comes through…Her images began to take on an iconic quality; the sprawled bather becomes powerful sinuous lines in “Desmoiselles of Langon” and these lead to contours of works like “Fossil.” 

“She exhibited her work widely between 1988 and 2005, and has shown at the Duxbury Art Complex, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, The Cape Museum of Fine Arts, Copley Society, Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Marion Art Center.  She has won numerous prizes in both painting and printmaking….”  She belonged to several arts organizations.