My artistic inclination found expression in my garden long before I discovered the joys of painting.  Every May my car makes automatic turns into nurseries and departs laden with some old favorites, but mostly impulsive purchases - much the way I load up my palette for  painting.   In the garden I just dive in - sticking new plants here and there, moving things around, seeing how things look next to each other, until it feels right to me.   The garden is a great place to play with color, form and texture; to learn the value of happy accidents and surprising combinatios. I often paint the way I garden - with abandon and few plans.  It feels like an indulgence, a feast; a happy, happy place for me to be.  I see that when you love something, you are most open to learning from it.   My favorite paintings seem to emerge from the paper like gifts.  I find this a fascinating process, completely different from the practice of trying to capture something I am looking at.  Working with brushes, palette knives, sometimes my fingers, I apply oil paint to paper.  The painting unfolds little by little, each new gesture taking the lead from previous ones, so that a finished piece has depended on itself, rather than an outside source for inspiration.  Things work out best for me when natural laws and acquired technique ride along on the wings of instinct and intuition. This process results in paintings that are definitely one of a kind, tending toward the abstract, but often suggestive of something quite familiar.  I find that abstraction allows viewers to make their own meaning and thereby a very personal  relationship with  a painting.  My hope is that my paintings will bring the same joy to the viewer that I have when I paint.