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
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