Artist Statement

As long as I can remember, I have been drawing and painting. As a student at Pratt Institute,

I gravitated to the integration of fine art and design. Inspired by the art trends of the late 1960s, I chose to work professionally in the then nascent field of graphic design.

 

I began my design career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, designing exhibitions and graphics to interpret the art and promote the exhibitons to the public. Working on staff at the Met for six years gave me the ability to study art and art history intimately on a daily basis. Working directly with curators and learning about the exhibit content firsthand was an unparalleled educational experience. Later, I served as art director for Mobil Oil Corporation and ultimately formed my own design firm, Roher/Sprague Partners in Irvington, NY.

 

Throughout my design career, I continued to express my emotional experience with my environment in oil on canvas, watercolor, and pastel. My interest has been in landscape and still life, as both inspire me use the geometry of the scene to create compositions that express what it feels like to be there. The shapes, color and light in the Hudson Valley where I live, and Block Island, and Long Island Sound, where I spend summers, have been the inspiration for many of my landscape paintings.


My technique involves drawing and photography on-site. I create my composition using my camera lens, and then use those images as reference for studio work. The photographs and sketches are visceral reminders of what it felt like to be in that place.


I enjoy traveling and experiencing life and culture in other parts of the world, which has resulted in a series of paintings of Japan, France, and the American West. I am compelled to share my personal experience and sense of place through my art, to create images that are not necessarily reality, but are how I see reality.


October, 2018

Education

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Cum Laude, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY


Additional Studies:

Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

School of Visual Arts, New York, NY


Artist-in-Residence

Villa-R, Gesso, Sicilia, Italy

Exhibitions

Women by Women, Blue Door Gallery 2018

Yonkers, NY 10701

Hot and Cool, Summer at the Blue Door 2017

Yonkers, NY 10701

Upstream Gallery Juried Exhibit 2017

Hastings-on-Hudson, NY

Blue Door Gallery Members Juried Exhibition 2014

Yonkers, NY 10701

Blue Door Gallery Members Juried Exhibition 2014

Yonkers, NY 10701

Upstream Gallery Juried Exhibit 2016

Hastings-on-Hudson, NY

Blue Door Gallery Members Juried Exhibition 2014

Yonkers, NY 10701

Blue Door Gallery Members Juried Exhibition 2013

Yonkers, NY 10701

Featured Artist Exhibit 2009, Mill Street Home

Greenwich, CT 06830

A Current River View, The Gallery at Hastings-on-Hudson, 1991

New York: Art on the Road, The Whitney Museum, 1979