About Loretta

I spent 30 years helping other people tell their stories. Then I picked up a tube of paint.

I had wanted to paint for a long time. When I finally did, I was drawn almost immediately to mixed media. Paint, paper, charcoal, graphite, oil stick, whatever made sense. I liked having choices. I still do. There is something about being able to reach for another material, make a mark, cover it up, tear something apart and put it back together differently that feels natural to me.

I am largely self-taught. Curiosity has always been a big part of who I am. I grew up one of four kids in a family without much money in a small town in Maine, and I didn’t always feel particularly understood. But I loved learning and discovering what else was out there. Eventually that took me from Maine to Massachusetts, through a long creative career, and much later, to painting.

Painting also arrived at a time when I needed it.

In the span of a few years, I lost both of my parents and a dog I had loved for twelve years. Painting became one of the ways I worked through that loss. It also gave me a place for stories and experiences that went back much further.

I am a survivor of domestic violence. More than 30 years have passed, but experiences like that don’t simply disappear because time does. They become part of the person you grow into. I see that particularly in my paintings of women. They can be strong, funny, tired, skeptical, independent, vulnerable, sometimes all at once. I’m not interested in turning them into symbols of what women are supposed to be. I’m interested in who they actually are.

Other paintings come from family, animals, Maine, Massachusetts, ordinary rooms and things that have stayed with me for reasons I don’t always understand until I start painting them.

Turns out, I had a few stories of my own.

1997, Please Hold