I am a lucky person. A studio artist at age 80, I’m living a life of high creativity. I enjoy good health, while I see others decline at my age.

I grew up in Portage, WI, and for 50 years lived in Menomonee Falls, raising three children, who now are spread over the country. I attended University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, earning a Fine Arts Degree at age forty-eight.

There is a balance in my art, a symmetry, and a harmony of colors and shapes. I seem to need that. I can’t deal with contrast. I wipe it away. My daughter laughs at this, tells me I’ve used lots of bright colors before. I keep making my art images “work”, flow together, fit. People who look at my paintings say they’re soothing. They move their hands over them. There came a time after many years of painting when two clairvoyants told me I was making art that heals. Viewers feel good near it. When my art is in the room, the entire environment changes. I don’t try to figure it out, but I do pray before I paint.

Today we live in the northwoods of Wisconsin, in the town of Lac du Flambeau, on an Ojibwe reservation. Our house looks onto a jewel of a lake, where we swim every day. We listen to the wind in the pines, watch the light in the sky, and the repeat path of the moon from our large windows and patio glass. We breathe the pure air and feel fortunate.

I started painting when I was twenty-six. I am now eighty-one, that’s fifty-five years, and there’s been no let-up. Just full steam ahead, growing and painting the whole way. The joy has never lessened. Some of my friends have quit, probably because they’re tired of the stack of paintings under the bed. I say, “I do what people retire to do. I intend to continue on the other side.”