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A short bio in pictures.
I started fooling around with art in college in the mid-eighties. I liked printmaking, at least partly as a way around my lack of drawing skills.

 

 

I took some figure drawing classes and learned that you CAN learn how to draw. My favorite technique to practice was the blind contour. You look at whatever you’re drawing, not the paper, and draw what you SEE, not what you THINK you see. All my confidence in drawing comes from this technique.

I practiced on everything. Bottles of shampoo, my bulletin board, my friends . . .

(My teacher said: “good”!)

Printmaking was at least as much fun as I thought it would be, especially intaglio and lithography.

Today I don’t do either, because I don’t like all the chemicals.

You can’t have an acid bath in the same room where you sleep. Especially if you have a cat.

And you have to have really big, expensive presses, and maybe a hydraulic lift to move your litho stone around. And it just wasn’t where I wanted to go.

After college I left art alone for awhile. I was writer-girl then.

Here’s a woodcut from around 1990 that I made when I started to miss printmaking; I needed an outlet besides writing, and an escape from it. This print got me started again. Also I think it was the first time my work started to show some freedom and my own style.

In grad school, as an elective to a publishing program, I took a year-long letterpress printing course at the studios of Pyracantha Press on the ASU campus. I studied the history of printing, learned the basics of movable type and printed broadsides and a couple of small books with text and linoleum print images. I always thought the cut linoleum block (left) was far more interesting than the finished print (right). Keep that in mind for the quiz later.

After grad school I had a momentum to keep making art but no idea what to do with it. I started doodling people hanging out in coffee shops and sold the drawings as greeting cards at bookstores.

Then I moved to Flagstaff in 1995 for a job at a small publishing company that isn’t there anymore. I made some linoleum prints for the publisher: our Christmas card one year, illustrations for a kids’ book about Maria Martinez, the potter from San Ildefonso Pueblo who was famous for her black-on-black ceramic pots.

Tending the Fire Title Page

And I sold drawings and prints in The Artists Gallery, a co-op on San Francisco Street (it’s still there).

I moved away from linoleum when I came back to Phoenix in 1999. I wanted to work bigger, use more color, and find a more immediate process. My first efforts were more like my doodle drawings than paintings:

That’s a really bad picture but it’s all I have. Here’s a detail:

The doodle paintings led to drawing with marker on a canvas covered partially or completely with black paint, starting with this one:

Then figures like these:

And landscapes:

I got into still life a little:

Then cityscapes:

The lanscapes changed some after visiting Italy and starting to use my own photos as reference:

Somewhere in there I started doing this series of women inspired by Klimt:

Eventually all roads led here: Cityscapes on wood panel, a mix of everything I’ve done up to now. They’re marker drawings but not black on black. There’s mixed media with lots of texture, including carved areas, and collage using newspapers and magazines.

I’ve had some fun painting on glass:

And here we are.

Currently I’m working on something that’s been floating around in my head for a long time, the graphic novel:

They’re like the cityscapes in that they incorporate so many of my favorite different mediums and techniques: marker/pen drawings, mixed media, collage, carving. And you get a story! Updates weekly(ish) on the blog page. Ta for now.