These are the drawings I completed in 2011.  From the Weaver who weaves the substance of the universe from itself, to the Enchantress of Numbers, I hope that they’ll set your imagination aflame.

I like travel, drawing, hiking, and blowing glass.

I don’t like writing “about me” pages, because every time I return I sound really pompous to myself.

I’m married to an awesome, mad-scientist type of man named Dustin.  He’s at once my muse and grounding agent.  As long as I make art that he likes, I know I’m going the right direction.  After living in Florida for much too long, we abandoned everything we knew in Florida and moved out to Portland, Oregon.  We didn’t even know what was out there, except that the city had several very tall mountains all within 100 miles of it – and that 2 hours away you could find a desert.  Oh, and that Burning Man is a wee bit closer there than it is to Florida.

I like to use black ball-point gel pens, .2 and .3 mm, to draw.  I’ve often used Rapidographs, sometimes Micron 005s, but gel pens are sheer joy.  The pen actually moves where your hand tells it to go, never scratching or catching on the paper.  For color I use Leningrad watercolors, watercolor inks, and Prismacolor markers.  For my digital works, I take all the photos (except public domain space and electron microscopy images) and montage ‘em together.  I have a vast library of photos just waiting to be dissected.

I like to make my artwork detailed, because when I was very small my grandma took me to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  There, we sat for a very, very long time in front of one of the dioramas.  The longer we looked at it, the more we’d discover – a mouse, an insect, a lizard – all meticulously arranged to make the scene a slice of the forest.  Most settings in the world contain that baroque level of detail, if only we look hard enough – and I think that it’s important to pay close attention to the world around you, not just the objects that are intentionally designed to catch one’s attention.

Sometimes, life is better with a bit of CGI.  I love working with pen and ink, but there are certain concepts that are better rendered on a glowing computer screen with photomontage.  After all, when I’m looking to express a state of harmony between nature and technology, a medium thousands of years old doesn’t always seem appropriate.

Every day, I take reams of photos of stuff I think looks interesting or beautiful.  Not all these pictures make it to my portfolio or even to a Facebook album.  Yet their form finds new life in photomontage as I think, “This picture could really use something that looks like that thing I saw a few days ago…with different lighting and coloration!”.

Sometimes I use so much post-processing that it’s hard to tell what the original images even were (The Vortex).  Well, at least I think that’s the case.  Other times, like with “Tree Portal” I only add a bit of Hubble magic.  But aside from, on occasion, a few electron microscope components and Hubble Space Telescope photos, all the elements in the photomontage are mine alone.

This is the art I made from 2004 to 2009.  Inspired by the dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, I wanted to put the artifacts of my travels and daily life on display.  However, soon I wanted to tell more of a story.  “The Big Bang” (the image with the big pink maze) is a kind of story about the big bang of the human mind when we began to use symbols in thought and communication.  These drawings were the first time I had used this particular style with any success.

Thank you, everybody that came to my art opening and show.  You who gave special attention to my art, participated in the kava ceremony, stopped to chat, and generally made the atmosphere and energy WONDERFUL!

Also a big thanks to my friends for publicizing the event, to the owner and staff of Written on the Body for all their tremendous help and use of their space…and of course to Dustin, who helped me set everything up, tear it down, designed the awesome UV glowy sign, and made sure that I had food when I was too busy to be interested in it.