Artist Biography

My great grandfather, Charles Harold Davis, was an American Impressionist painter. My family owned many of his paintings of the Connecticut landscape. I loved them, and dreamed of someday climbing rocky hillsides and making pictures too.

In art school I discovered the Abstract Expressionists, and was mesmerized by their paintings, their big gestures and ideas. Abstract Expressionism drew me to New York. By the time I got there Jackson Pollack and Franz Klein had died, De Kooning had left for Long Island, and Joan Mitchell had moved to Paris, but they continued to influence me. My own work explored different degrees of realism and abstraction, with nature always as the starting point.

Several years later a trip to a small cabin in the mountains of British Columbia changed my life. It was immediately clear that these were not the rolling hills of Connecticut! It was wilderness on a grand scale: massive, dynamic and aggressive. It was like walking through a De Kooning painting. The valleys were deep. The trees were huge. Whitewater rivers cascaded from glacial cirques; water was everywhere.

Back in my studio my paintings grew larger and more dynamic. Eventually, in 2006, my husband (composer Richard Peaslee) and I left New York and moved to the Northwest.

I am currently working on a series of paintings about the changeable weather of the Northwest coast.