About Rebecca

I grew up in the Los Angeles area with my mother, father and three siblings. I always loved to make art and was encouraged to do so. My mother started taking me to exhibitions at an early age, including a Rico Lebrun show when I was eight years old, which made a lasting impression. I used to "ditch" high school and go to the art museums with my mom, which seemed quite daring and was very inspirational. My father also encouraged me to follow my passion, and taught me about hard work, the values of a good education, and the personal rewards of loyalty and generosity. I owe everything to my parents.

I studied English Literature at Colby College, Maine and The University of Wales in Swansea, Wales. Afterwards, I interned for a summer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City under the Hilla S. Rebay Fellowship. I returned to LA to be with my mother, who was losing a twelve-year battle with breast cancer, and the rest of my family. I worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, leading an effort to catalogue the entire collection for the first time in its forty-year history. There was a Mark Rothko exhibition at LACMA at the time, that changed the course of my life. Rothko, along with Rembrandt, O'Keefe and Monet, has been a constant source of inspiration and admiration. After seeing his work, I felt that Rothko had lived an art life, if not a personal one, that was extraordinarily rich and that had taken him to places of the heart and spirit where I would like to go. I came across a biography of Rothko's life and a catalogue of the Art Students League of New York, where Rothko studied, side by side in LACMA's library. Shortly thereafter, I headed to New York City and studied at both the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design for six years. My teachers were the great figurative teacher, Robert Beverly Hale ("Drawing Lessons of the Great Masters"), Ted Seth Jacobs and Ron Sherr.

I lived in Switzerland and Yosemite Valley for three years, painting landscapes. In 1987, I moved to Santa Cruz, California, where I live with my husband of eleven years, Eric, and our two daughters, Leia and Kira. My husband has always been a source of refuge and strength for me and I thank him for a wonderful life together. My daughters are amazing and delightful, and keep me on my toes. They are the ones who urge me to get back into the studio whenever I start to expend extra energy on housecleaning rather than artmaking (this doesn't happen too often!) In 1993, I earned my M.F.A. from John F. Kennedy University and now teach drawing and painting at The College of San Mateo and Cabrillo College. For the past two years, I've been lucky enough to teach painting and drawing in London and Florence for CSM and the American Institute for Foreign Studies. I continue to work on my lilies, figures and landscapes as well as a new series on the Antarctica. Thank-you for visiting my website!