Living in the west was remarkable and inspiring, but time to move back east. I began teaching at a much larger high school, more responsibilities with less energy for my own art-making. However, the change also provided new opportunities.
During the summer of 2004 I had the honor of being selected to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the teacher's institute. Everyday we had studio time with critiques and slide lectures given by various artists currently working with contemporary practices and from the Art:21 series (Lane Relyea, Tracy Miller, Elizabeth Condon, Dike Blair, Harrell Fletcher, Joanne Greenbaum and Shirley Kaneda). Rika Burnham from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Guided us through the Art Institute, studying techniques which were then incorporated into our own works in the studio. The sheer amount of information was overwhelming to the point that when I returned back to my own studio, I no longer was sure what and how I wanted to paint.
I regained a focus in the summer of 2007 while studying contemporary landscape painting at Wild Acres in North Carolina with Cassandra James. The techniques employed utilized expressive drawing as the basis of the painting, working from dark to light. "Lay in broad areas of value and color..." bringing in "areas of pigment up to the edge of dark underdrawing..." (from James' Review of Standard Technique)
North Carolina landscapes in particular continued to be the subject and inspiration of the majority of my paintings, as we spent many holidays and summers on our property in the mountains.
With each visit to our cabin, the mixed media images in my sketchbook became the primary means to expressing daily observations.