“As fourth graders at Welsh Elementary School in Rockford, my classmate Kristin Henard and I co-authored and illustrated a book entitled The Two Friends. Xeroxed and stapled, this book tells the story of an eagle and a horse who meet in the wild and become friends. Two of the book’s illustrations, both simple line drawings, picture the eagle, Bushy-Tail, riding on the back of the horse, Cherokee. It was a start.
“While a fledgling adult artist in 1998, the Illinois Committee for the National Museum of Women in the Arts selected a beaded painting of mine called Flight of the Zebra for an exhibition. With a red bird perched on a zebra, the images of Bushy-Tail and Cherokee were back. Still great friends, they had morphed into an explosion of texture and color, and both now sported human feet. Anthropomorphism had taken root. Eight years later I returned to D.C. as a professional artist exhibiting my work at the Smithsonian Craft Show. My animal forms had become three-dimensional, and all had human glass eyes.
“Always in such a hurry to create enough work to fill my booth for the next show, I seldom take time to stop, breathe, and reflect. As I sit here at the computer, with beads accidentally glued to my pants, I’m further reminded that my life as an artist, and my story as a person, are intertwined with the significance of the animals that cross my path. Animals are as invested in our experience as we are in theirs. Sometimes I think we want to see ourselves in these creatures in order to hear the messages they bring.
I know I do.
“The show Light of the Moon highlights the first decade of my life as a working artist. Whether two-dimensional or sculptural, the core of this work continues to explore my own interpretation of contemporary mythology. In the beaded painting entitled Surfacing, the white buffalo gently challenges a figure to come out of the darkness and find her heart as the subtle light of the moon looks on. Half of the viewers looking at my three-dimensional fox head Walden interpret him as an entirely different animal, a deer. Taking no offense, I relish the blurring between prey and predator. Lately I’ve come full circle, as the human heads of my earlier paintings have found their way into my sculptures as antique doll parts. That’s always fun—when an unintentional connection becomes obvious.”