I have been painting, writing and making things since I was a young girl growing up in Queens, where my friends and I gathered on our stoops with our drawing pads and pencils, our lanyards and gum wrapper necklaces. Inside my apartment, alone at my desk, I inked pictures on paper, organic abstracts with amoebic shapes and elegant lines. Or I wrote. Stories. Little books. Comic strips.

Fast forward. In college, at the University at Albany, I studied English, studio art and art history. I learned drawing and painting from Mark Greenwold and journalism from William Kennedy and the late Lee Berry. I have worked full-time as a journalist and in the communications field for decades.

In 2001, I chanced upon an arts retreat in Peterborough, Ontario. I signed up for the writing program but midway through, switched to painting. In a light-filled studio in the tranquility of the Kawartha lakelands, I painted every day and late into the night. Time collapsed; it was as though I were back in college, working at my easel non-stop. I have been painting ever since while writing full-time and also freelancing essays.

Art is a language of its own, one that grounds and balances me. I love scratching through my canvas or a chunk of wood to reveal other layers of color or patterns beneath the surface, a playful turn of the palette knife that catapults me back to girlhood scribbles. I find inspiration in the masters Matisse, Turner and Modigliani, and in the great colorist Zygmund Jankowski, whose art I discovered several years ago at the Trident Gallery in Gloucester, Mass. Unlike when I am writing, an enterprise steeped in painstaking detail, I cherish the luxury of flowing where my art takes me. Some days, a single color or shape, a sense of place or even a mood, can send me off in unknown directions. In both real and imagined terrain, I try to go beyond what my eyes can see to what my heart and mind instinctually know.