While living in Europe, Portuguese jazz musicians in Paris would call her "Luta" as she strolled across the plaza, hair a-flutter, paper and pastels in hand. Luta is a symbol of freedom and strength, and these attributes are consistently reflected in her artwork.

Today, Lu (as she prefers to call herself) is a remarkable self-taught, self-assured artist, who captures the female form in a moment of honesty, a time of thought.

Raised in a small town in Iowa, she continues to embrace the integrity of middle America through her depiction of real moments, filled with happiness and hurt, anticipation and anguish. All the while, she sticks to a need to be true with her art by using pastels, so that she can tug and turn at her subject to make each stroke a bold and sometimes irreverent touch of reality for the viewer.