My tropical childhood was spent in Havana, Cuba, Miami, Florida, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.  Childhood memories from Havana vary from often nightly pre-revolution gunshots in our quiet Havana suburban neighborhood, buying guava or mamay popsicles from street vendors, seeing horse drawn carts on city streets, and watching with my brother safaris of black ants carrying bits of bright hibiscus flowers in the early morning light.

My family left Cuba post-revolution, April 1960, for Miami, Florida where there were palm trees in the front yard and a blue pool in the back, surrounded by hibiscus and gardenia bushes.  Among my memories of living in Florida include riding my bike with my best friend to Key Biscayne, a 20 mile bike ride, passing Fairchilds Tropical Botanical Garden and Vizcaya museum and gardens.  Banyan trees, Flamboyan trees, cascades of bouganvilla were the backdrop of our excursions.

My high school years were spent in San Juan, Puerto Rico in a private school with spanish architecture:  balconies overlooking a courtyard with Flamboyan trees reaching up and over the 2nd floor balconies.  In the four years my family lived in Puerto Rico I learned to surf.  I was asked to join a team and participated in the 1968 world surfing championships held in Rincon, Puerto Rico that year.  

Elon College, now Elon University, is where I began my college education, majoring in French.  At the end of my sophmore year I transfered to Florida State University.  I took 5 years to get through my undergraduate degree because found myself in the all you can eat buffet of knowledge and wanted to major in everything.  Since high school, I continually took art courses and continued to do this in college.  In 1974, I graduated with a major in Painting and minor in Dance. 

During my college years I developed a deep interest in Insight Meditation.  This interest evevantually lead me to further intensive study and practice in California where I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

In 1982 after my first daughter was born we moved to Virginia to be nearer to family. I have lived and thrived here since.  During this time I have earned a Bachelors in Nursing and a Masters in Nursing with a specialty in Family Practice.  I also married a wonderful man, an artist, and had another wonderful daughter.  I have been a licensed RN for 21 years and have been a practicing Nurse Practitioner the last 11 years.  My sisters, and my amazingly healthy,  elderly parents live close by.

It has been a varied, rich, and eventful life that reawakens these last several years to painting.  I am back full circle, with my romantic notions about art, what it means to make and show art.  Making a painting has an entirely new energy for me now because time is precious and fleeting.  Life is full and I have many committments.  I allow life to inform my art and art to inform my life.  I find there is less and less a seperation between them, after all, living is the real art.