As for my artistic outlook, I enjoy beauty all around me. I choose to LOOK for beauty everywhere: it could be flowers, or the play of light in a cityscape, or the myriad of colors of a crashing ocean wave. When I create art, I am trying to express how and why something is beautiful to me. Most of my work has been representational rather than abstract. However recently I started exploring how I can weave my visual art with my other artistic pursuit: music. I've been performing as a mezzo soprano singer for 25 years, and recently started to depict how a particular piece of music makes me feel. As such my newest focus is to create paintings about music. I have as inspiration, composer Modest Mussorgsky's orchestral work "Pictures at an Exhibition" depicting his experience of walking through a gallery. I'm working in the other direction--music interpreted as paintings. I know this is not a new idea. But trying to depict what I feel when I hear musical favorites and sharing that vision is new for me. My hope is to create an emotional experience for the viewer: I hope they like my paintings on their own; but I also hope they listen to the music that inspired the paintings. I think all of us would benefit from more art and music. I hope people will enjoy my "music as paintings" series.