I was born into a family deeply woven into the history of the American West, and I believe that sense of inheritance shaped me long before I ever picked up a paintbrush seriously. A Pacific Northwest native now living and working in the Texas Hill Country, I create oil paintings rooted in atmosphere, memory, emotion, and the quiet weight of where we come from.

My family is considered one of the founding families of early Washington Territory. My sixth-great-grandfather, Judge Sidney Smith Ford, was a pioneer, territorial judge, civic leader, and one of the signers of the historic Monticello Convention, whose petition ultimately led to the creation of Washington Territory. During the turbulent years surrounding the treaty councils and the Indian Wars of the 1850s, Ford became known as a trusted intermediary between Native communities and territorial leaders. Historical accounts describe hundreds, and at times thousands, of Native people gathering at his homestead, where he assumed responsibility for their care while striving to preserve peace during one of the region’s most pivotal and uncertain periods.

Through that same lineage, my family also shares documented ancestry with President Abraham Lincoln, as well as a musician from a legendary Pacific Northwest band. To me, those connections are less about prestige than about recognizing how resilience, creativity, storytelling, and artistry can echo through generations in different forms.

On my paternal side, my lineage traces back to Mayflower descendants who later traveled west by wagon train along the Oregon Trail. I have preserved family records documenting those journeys, including handwritten journals, photographs, and generational archives. My ancestors helped log the forests of Oregon and Washington, lay iron for expanding railroads, and bore tunnels through rugged wilderness while operating remote railroad and logging camps throughout the Pacific Northwest. That history of migration, labor, survival, and frontier endurance quietly lives beneath much of my work.

I have always been deeply connected to preservation, ancestry, and storytelling. I collect and care for family archives, handwritten journals, photographs, letters, antique furniture, and generational objects that many people might overlook. I don’t simply love beautiful things; I love what they carry—the evidence that someone existed, struggled, migrated, built something, survived something, and left pieces of themselves behind for the next generation to discover.

That emotional connection to history inevitably finds its way into my paintings.

I have always drawn and painted, a lifelong passion that eventually led to an opportunity to train classically. Recognizing my natural talent, a Polish master painter and family friend in Olympia, Washington, fostered my development through a summer apprenticeship. My education was deeply traditional: glazing, composition, discipline, and learning to truly see light and form before interpreting them emotionally. Although my work leans contemporary and expressive today, an old-world structure still lies beneath every painting. I believe that balance between discipline and emotion is what gives my work its voice.

Working primarily in oils, I move between landscapes and figurative painting. My work explores atmosphere, low fog, shifting light, emotional stillness, femininity, memory, and the quiet tension between softness and strength. I’m drawn to moments that feel suspended in time—the feeling of remembering something rather than simply seeing it. Some passages are rendered with careful realism while others dissolve into abstraction, because that’s how memory lives: clear in places, softened in others.

Before becoming a full-time artist, I spent decades building businesses in the wellness, spa, education, and beauty industries. I founded MISSION Day Spa and worked as an entrepreneur, educator, formulator, consultant, and creative director. That chapter taught me how to build something from nothing, how to lead, how to communicate visually, and how to trust intuition. Eventually, painting called loudly enough that I chose the artist’s path completely.

Today I paint full time from Texas, surrounded by Hill Country light while still carrying the Pacific Northwest in my bones.

I believe my work exists somewhere between heritage and emotion, between realism and memory. I want my paintings to feel collected rather than manufactured—to evoke heirlooms, forgotten stories, weathered photographs, inherited jewelry, or places that feel strangely familiar, as though they’ve lived inside us long before we arrived.

At the end of the day, I’m not simply painting landscapes or portraits. I’m painting atmosphere, lineage, nostalgia, resilience, womanhood, grief, softness, beauty, and the profound tenderness of being alive at all.