Deborah was born in California and raised in the transient lifestyle of an Air Force family until she left for college. She earned a BA studio art from Mills College, studied printmaking and art history at Brown University, and got her MA in art history from Johns Hopkins.

During a time when the practice of painting was declared dead, and pop and conceptual art were supreme, her early studio training in drawing the human body involved working from the draped or nude female figure. The objectification of the female was so pervasive that it seemed like gravity or breathing – a natural part of the environment.

A consideration of the possibilities of a male odalisque was disrupted in the early ‘80’s when the terrifying concept of male vulnerability emerged in a way that did not immediately impact the image of the warrior or cowboy whose death or damage had been a staple of heroic statuary, paintings, movies and nightly news reports – but struck at the heart of cultural vitality, innovation and artistic sustainability. Her reaction to this epidemic was to create images of males as compelling iconic objects – commemorations of appealing, but perishable beauty.

Making these lush images of the male figure leads to a renewed interest in still life – fruits and cut vegetables chosen and prepared for nourishment. They represent items that sustain life –  exuding beauty and immediate allure – but the glory of their fresh ripeness and usefulness is brief.

Many of these images are drawn from life, but the deliberate pace of the work – the repeated layering of colors – lends itself to the use of photographs - her own or images clipped from magazines. She prefers to work from black and white photos or photocopies, so that the actual hues of the original image do not interfere with her color choices.