I

am an artist on a journey— an eclectic mix of creative ventures, one yielding to the next, overlapping, joining, blending, or synthesizing to create new forms. Guided by my muse, I travelled a road fraught with potholes, sharp turns, forks, switchbacks, detours, obstacles, false starts and dead ends, leading always to the mastery of one or another skill, medium, modality or life lesson.

My thespian era began at age ten—drama, dance and voice lessons, high school and undergrad plays—and ended in New York at twenty-one, when I realized success was elusive. Time not wasted, my foray into 1960s Greenwich Village ignited a passion for creating off-beat clothing and jewelry.

Returning to Baltimore, I enrolled in the Maryland Institute College of Art (now MICA). I earned BFA and MFA degrees as an Art Ed major, working in clay, metal, fiber arts, photography and graphic design.

By midlife, I had burned through an inheritance on a series of failed commercial enterprises. Discouraged, I felt I needed a new direction. A consultation with an astrologer opened my eyes and shifted my focus inward to find deeper meaning in my work—as a vocation—beyond making money, to ‘making a difference’.

What better way to discover my ‘mission’ than to immerse myself in the occult! I completed an internship in karmic astrology, trained in past life regression and taught myself to channel from a book. I became a SoulCollage© facilitator, adding this art-therapy type process to the mix. While still making art, I built a client practice helping other women to embark on their ‘Heroine’s Journey’—true work, personal power, and unique contribution to the world.

Communication, being essential to my purposes, I gave lectures and honed my writing skills in email and on-line newsletters, (social media was not yet a ‘thing’), brochures, and workbooks. As a retirement project I am working on a series of compelling and entertaining historical novels based on real women, in which the life journeys of the characters are a vehicle to impart the wisdom I have gleaned from a lifetime of experience.