I found pastels one weekend while I was in a nearly empty apartment waiting for my then husband to get the furnishings from Kansas City to Oklahoma City strapped to a golf cart trailer. It was a long trip. I was bored.

A friend had given me some pastels and a sketch pad, which I had looked at, then shortly put away. They were too messy. The paper wasn't big enough. In the end, months of looking at the striking beauty of Oklahoma won out over blank walls and  the neighbor's too faint radio.

I taped some newspaper to the wall to make the apartment-texture go away, then made a six pane window out of the paper in the sketch pad. It was like a prayer; a thank you, a
beginning. A new way to worship my Creator in a beautiful and lasting way,  by expressing the art of nature's creation.

Some people believe art is only art if it "pushes the edge."  The only edge I want to push is the one that opens the window so I can actually hear the cottonwood trees in my favorite painting.

These pastels are not my only art. They are not just art. Some are meditations, a place to look where the autumn sun turns everything gold and warm oranges. Some are journeys to harvest, or the way cicadas sound in the summer when the grass is long and red. Some are my prayers, and I will keep them always.

I create new originals when ever I have the energy, and when they have to come out on
paper. I hope you enjoy them, and that maybe they can give you a place to go, spiritually comfortable, where the life all around you is vividly alive.