My paintings, drawings, and monoprints derive from the landscape. Places and experiences take on significant meaning: Vermont’s landscape in all its seasons, the tides on the coast of Maine, or travels with my sister and family. The artwork is not about specific places but about significant moments that ignite a feeling of being alive in the space. The formal structures of nature directly experienced or recalled give my work the solid foundation upon which I improvise abstractions. My personal experiences in nature are realized in the medium of the paint. And the intensity of emotion is physically put forth through the movement/marks of the paint.

My paintings move back and forth between figurative landscape and abstraction. My artwork invokes many emotions during the process, similar to how music can invoke a plethora and continuum of raw emotions.

I am a third-generation Mexican American who spent most of my youth growing up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. As a child I enjoyed many family trips to South Padre Island, and other excursions. My time spent swimming and being in the water impacted the artist I am today. I earned a BFA from Texas Woman’s University and an MFA from Louisiana State University. I moved to Vermont in 1995, where I began working as a staff artist at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC). I was the School Arts Coordinator for the Vermont Studio Center for twenty years in partnership with Johnson Elementary School.

Since 1989, I have exhibited nationally, and my artwork is part of many private and public collections. In 2024, I had a solo show at the Iridian Gallery at Diversity Richmond in Virginia and the VSC Red Mill Gallery in Johnson, Vermont, part of a two-person exhibition at Ava Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and paintings in a group show at K. Grant Fine Art in Vergennes, Vermont; other exhibitions include Mountains at Collioure by Jared Quinton in 2022 and Made in Vermont at the Hall Art Foundation in 2019. I was a featured artist in the spring 2023 publication of Iterant, Quarterly Poetry, and Art. My artwork is on the cover of poet Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. I am a Vermont Arts Council FY2024 Creation Grantee, and I continue to live in northern Vermont, where I spend my days painting, working part-time at the VSC, and taking endless walks.

Studio - December 2016, photo by Warren Buckles