Erin’s passionate connection with the arts began at an early age. As a young girl growing up in Los Angeles, she would often visit art museums, then return home to spend days sequestered in her room with paint and paper, struggling to recreate the images she had seen.
When Erin attended UC Santa Cruz, she adopted the art department’s A-frame painting studio in the redwoods as her second home. There, after the other students had departed and the fog had rolled in, she would spend the night, immersed in the creative process. Erin knew then that her life’s work, whatever it might be, would find its strength and inspiration in this process. Erin graduated with honors from UC Santa Cruz in 1975 with a degree in Arts, Crafts, and their History. She went on to get a masters degree in 1978 in Expressive Arts Therapies from Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Erin worked as an Art Therapist in Massachusetts until she embarked upon a journey of spirit that continues to sustain her to this day. Traveling to and living in India, Erin spent several years immersed in the study of meditation and Eastern spirituality. Setting aside the paint brush, she spent the next 20 years teaching people how to access and live in the creative flow of life. During this period she also started and managed an artistic hand crafted furniture business, and co-founded and served as Executive Director for the Satsang Foundation & Press / Gangaji Foundation offering meditations and spiritual teachings throughout the world.
In 1997 Erin’s life took a sudden and dramatic turn when she was a passenger in a head-on car collision. The head injuries she sustained temporarily – but severely – impaired the activities of her rational mind. No longer able to rely on logic and linear thinking, Erin was thrust into an experience of directly perceiving the world. Once she began to find her way through the confusion, the most prominent feature of her experience was one of being overwhelmed by the beauty she found in life. After 20 years, she began to paint again.
Erin paints primarily in acrylics to evoke shape, depth, movement, and atmosphere. Her work is expressionistic, often featuring the human figure emerging from abstract shapes. She uses rich colors to tell her stories, which are inspired by visions welling up from the mysterious world of archetype and symbol. Her paintings, often described as “worlds within worlds,” explore the numinous relationships between people, earth, nature, and the divine.
Erin designed her painting studio — her sanctuary — to celebrate and amplify her deep connection with the natural world. Nestled in the foothills of the Sierras in Nevada City, California, her studio/gallery overlooks Deer Creek; it is surrounded by rose bushes, dahlias, fruit trees and song birds, and is watched over by a towering giant sequoia. She lives with her wife Charlotte and their two dogs – Armani, the Italian Greyhound rescue and Mishka, the Bichon.
Erin’s paintings are held in private collections throughout the United States.