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 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 fifteen years teaching people how to access and live in the creative flow of life.
In 1997 her 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’s work in oils, acrylics, and mixed media 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 explore relationships between people, nature, culture, and the divine.
Here she shares a taste of her creative process:
“Painting is how I express my devotion to the mystery of life. For me, the mystery dwells everywhere, in every thing, but is often veiled by the activity and concerns of everyday life.
When I paint I recreate colors, shapes, and gestures – impressions that offer themselves up from deep within. These images somehow lift the veils, allowing a glimpse of the mysterious to shine through.
Because every aspect of my process is directed by an ongoing dialogue with the not-yet-formed, the outcome is never certain. Most often, the finished piece bears little resemblance to my original impression. Even the materials I use – oil, watercolor, acrylic, and oil pastels – often combined in unusual ways, invite the unpredictable nature of creativity.
My paintings are expressionistic, featuring the human form emerging from abstract geometric shapes and symbols. I use rich, bold colors to explore relationships between people, nature, culture, and the divine.
If paintings are windows, mine peer into a world where the line between archetype and ordinary reality is blurred, where the ancient rubs shoulders with the present. Through these windows, stories come to life, stories that can only be told in the potent and mysterious language of art.”
Erin’s paintings are held in private collections throughout the United States. She currently works out of her studio/gallery in Nevada City, California.