Painting is the medium that best expresses my ideas and my technical skill.  There is a magical moment that happens when, through this liquid medium, color and edge and value combine to create a window into another world that speaks to reality, yet is only this flat surface with color.  I am Baroque in my color sensibility and reference much historically that has gone before, but my aesthetic is contemporary as are the cultural references and the Magical Realism to which I adhere.  My paintings reflect the influence of the places I have seen, visited, or lived in.  All of these environments are referenced either directly or more subtly within my paintings.  I paint from a desire for beauty and otherness, of transcendent movements that still occur in dreams, memory and magic moments in nature.  I want to capture the sense of routine and ritual, the sublime with the mundane and how they can mix in equal parts.    

born: 1962, Stuttgart, Germany

education:

University of New Mexico, MFA 1993
University of New Mexico, MA with Distinction, 1991
University of Arizona, BFA, 1984

selected awards/honors

Wyoming Arts Council Visual Arts  Fellowship, 2008-2009
Wyoming Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship, 1999-2000
Juror's Choice Award, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH. 1999
Baer Award in Painting, Wyoming Arts Council, 2001

selected publications

New American Paintings, Western Edition, #60, 2005
Gossips, Gorgons and Crones, Illustrator, Author Jane Caputi, Bear and Co. Press, 1993
The Marsh King's Daughter, Illustrator, Linnea Gentry and Ricki Klages, Harbinger House Books, 1987

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Sandy Carson Gallery: Un Viaggiatore Agitato: A Restless Traveler, Denver, CO. 2007
JRC Exhibitions, EU British Semester:  This Green and Pleasant Land: Ispra, Italy, 2005
Epping Forest District Museum: Ricki Klages: Magical Realism, Waltham Abbey, United Kingdom, 2004
Olin Gallery, Kenyon College: Lucid Dreaming,  Gambier, OH. 2001

selected group shows

Galerie Knud Grothe: Fantastiske Figurationer, Charlottenlund, Denmark. 2009
Galerie Knud Grothe: Fantastiske Figurationer, Charlottenlund, Denmark. 2008
Manifest Gallery and Drawing Center: Terra Firma, Cincinnati, OH. 2008.
Foothills Art Center: REALationships:  Works of Surreal Inspiration, Golden, CO. 2007