I came to the Bay Area in 1976 to attend what was then called the California College of Arts and Crafts. I had been a stained glass craftsperson in Venice, California while working my way through undergraduate requirements at Santa Monica College. At CCAC, I primarily focussed on drawing as that was where the juice was for me. After CCAC, I continued to practice  gure drawing with a small group of artists at Keith Cranmer’s Berkeley studio for many years. I also painted landscapes en plein aire and studied with Camille Prezwodek. In 2018, my husband and I moved to the Sierra foothills. I have slowly been getting settled in this very di erent climate where extreme weather makes being a studio artist a good idea and recently I have begun exploring abstraction. To this end, I was stretching some canvases last July, when I looked out the window and saw the enormous pyrocumulous cloud from the Oak  re. The rest of the day was spent preparing for the possibility of evacuation and that became a reality by the afternoon. Thankfully, we still have our home. We know people whose homes and possesions burned to the ground. On a Saturday in August, I lost myself in making these mixed media collages as a way to recover from post traumatic stress. Art is healing.