Artist’s Statement - In discovering soft pastels I soon realized that here was a medium that allowed me to paint and draw at the same time. How fantastic. The colours are brilliant and fresh and the process challenging.

It makes sense to paint the world around me, to somehow translate the beauty of what I see everyday. Having had an idylic childhood on the Southern Gulf Islands, exploring the woods and beaches, I knew from a young age that I was an artist. In 1985, I received a Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Victoria and went on to the Banff Centre in Alberta where I continued to paint and to work. In 1997, after a year’s stint sheep farming on Salt Spring Island, I returned to Vancouver Island to live and paint. The dog portraits are painted from impromptu photographs taken when walking with Brodie, a four year old English Retriever. Always there are interesting dogs to meet and dog owners are usually pretty interesting, too. Not surprisingly most of the dogs in this collection are older and they each obliged me by sitting still long enough to have their photograph taken. The landscapes are my attempts to capture the stillness of an afternoon under the trees, the scudding of clouds across a brilliant sky and maybe just a hint of that long ago childhood.