Virtually every surface in Dorothy’s studio is covered with the objects she uses in her glowing oils of still life subjects-dried flowers and eucalyptus leaves, pears and lemons, bright fabrics and Chinese figurines, copper pots and porcelain bowls, Japanese puppets and fans. A jar of ruby-colored, opal-basil vinegar sits in the center of a composition she’s creating for a new painting. “I shop in grocery stores not for food to eat but for stuff to paint,” the tall, slender artist says with a laugh. “It’s the color that often draws me to an object, secondarily the shape.”

“I was very drawn to painting and drawing as a young child. It’s always been a compulsion.” Dorothy majored in art at a state university in Oklahoma for three years. Dorothy took art classes from Richard Goetz, a noted still life artist, she studied with him while her children were little. She always had a playpen in her studio-painting mainly still life’s. Over the years she has taken workshops with others, Sergei Bongart and David Leffel, but it’s really hard to teach someone to paint. You can learn how to draw, you can learn perspective, but not how to see. That is the big thing for Dorothy. She has a compulsion to record what she sees. “I can’t paint a flower as beautiful as a flower is, only an impression of flowers.” But there is something of the artist in that painting of the flowers, something special about the way the artist looks at flowers that comes through on the canvas. “I don’t think of it as mystical, though. It’s direct and practical. I see something, I respond, I record it."