People often say to me "Oh, you are so talented!", and I think to myself no - "I am just so lucky and damn stubborn!"

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I was not one of those children who are born with a brush in their hands.  Art didn't really interested me till I was 15 years old. My family decided to immigrate to the U.S. and I had a year of high school left to finish.  But my dad offered for me instead to take private painting classes.  How could I say NO and so my art journey began. A year later, we moved to Los Angeles and I found myself attending a high school with no English. Art became my favorite class since I didn't need to speak. 

 

I  knew that I wanted to be a traditional painter, but 30 years ago traditional training was hard to find and so my path  lead me through many school and places - Loyola Marymount University, Art Center College of Design, Florence Academy, Italy and Student League in New York.   All of these schools and still I felt  in a fog of confusion till I got lucky and met David Leffel, a master painter who become my guide for the next seven years. David often said "Painting is logical and therefore it's learnable."  I really wanted to learn it and with great stubbornness I painted a few hundreds bad paintings before something started to shift. 

 

Every artist has its own journey, mine was was and long and every day I feel lucky to be painting, to be learning, to be discovering .