I was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky on 5-5-55 while my father was serving in the US Army. I grew up in Novi, Michigan...at that time it was an industrial town on the edge of the suburbs of Detroit. Now it’s the shopping hub in east Michigan, go figure. When I was a child you could get your hair cut at the bait shop and pick up your basic medical needs at the Rx right next door to the Frisbee applliance store. Add a tiny library, dentist, bar and nursing home...that about does it.

As an adolescent, my uncle gave me a handful of tubes of nearly empty paint (oils) and I painted on the backs of the paint by numbers that were really the beginning of my training as an artist.

In high school, we were fortunate enough to have a 4 year program in art but when I moved to a small town in Illinois they had one year. I already had so many credits towards graduation that the school board allowed the teacher to devise a self-study for me so I could continue art classes through my Junior year. We dabbled in enamel, stained glass, painting, and whatever the budget would allow.

I planned to go to college to study fashion design/marketing. However, my boyfriend of 4 years and I decided to get married and my artistic hunger was satiated by a craft painting class just a few driveways from our house. I painted and sewed for two decades until I got sick after a trip to a foreign country and spent nearly a decade being mostly bedridden. The variety of things I was doing had avalanched into being a full wedding planner, and now it was over.

While ill, I took an art class at the college where my husband teaches and as a final project I entered my first portrait (of my first granddaughter) at a local juried art show. My work won the “peoples choice award”. I use a medium now that was developed for people who wanted the benefits of oil but the petroleum products were off limits because of my immune system faillure.

Genesis Artist Colors are thinned down polymer (like the Fimo or Kato clay) that you cure in a low temperature oven. Unless heated, the medium stays workable for months, even years (just keep the dust and the lady bugs out of it). It’s perfect so when I have something going and have a “bad day” or week, I just put a dust cover over it and come back when I am ready, and there’s my palette, waiting for me just like I left it.

After a couple of years with Doctor Goldberg in Atlanta, Georgia, I am healthier than I have ever been, and my creativity is at a new “high”...

So here I go...Darlene by Heart. I have had some artistic background, but mostly I paint what I see, I read a lot of painting books, but use technique that best expresses putting to canvas, what I see...often breaking the rules of traditional training...not intentionally, but I’m in a “live and learn” place.

Thank you for looking at my work, I hope you see my heart in it.