About

I have been reflecting on the story of Daphne and Apollo, myth, memories, and mortality.

Places resonate. My drawing practice is my most crucial tool. Plein-air painting and drawing are the basis of oil paintings re-imagined and finished in the studio. To paraphrase the Scottish painter Joan Eardley, the more I see, the more there is to paint.  

I have always painted. As a very young person, I studied with Ed Connolly and Richard Grosvenor, both in Newport, Rhode Island. I attended the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 1974. In 1972 I attended Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland. In 2002 I completed a master’s degree in archeology from Harvard University. My archeological fieldwork was in Honduras and Mexico, where I found many visual parallels to the landscape of my early childhood in southern California.

I worked in the children’s book publishing world from 1977 to 2018. I was art director and designer of children’s books, at Charlesbridge Publishing, Houghton Mifflin, and Little, Brown and Company, as well as running my own graphic design business, Ars Agassiz. I taught children’s book design for many years at the Radcliffe Publishing Program, and lecture regularly at Rhode Island School of Design's Illustration Department. I have given workshops on children's book illustration at the University of Southern Maine, Maine College of Art, and at SCBWI conferences around the world. I am a member of the Society of Printers in Boston. I was fortunate in my publishing career to have worked with many extremely talented artists all of whom have taught me so much.