Often my drawings will mark important events in my life.
“Carousel”, a whimsical grouping of horses, done in coloured pencil, is one of my all time favourite works. It is the first drawing I completed after having a baby. I did it during those early months, both wonderful and overwhelming, while trying to find my way as a new mother. I remember sitting at my drawing table while my daughter was napping, listening to her coo as she awakened, thinking, “I can still do this, I can actually be an artist and a mother!”
Many years ago when my maternal grandmother passed away I did a lithograph entitled “Memories of a Simpler Time”. I always loved her beautiful plants and particularly admired her talent for growing violets. She was a difficult woman but I found creating this print helped me remember pleasant times between us.
In my drawings I have always thought about negative space versus positive space and how they affect one another. In art, as in life, without the negative we would not appreciate the positive. When my father became ill, after years of a very tumultuous relationship, I became his primary caregiver for almost two years until his death. We talked and laughed like never before (and sometimes I wanted to pull my hair out!). I will be forever grateful for that precious time. This experience has taught me that in life sometimes the negative becomes the positive and vice versa. Since his death I have been doing a series of pencil drawings, such as “Along Came A Spider”, where this positive/negative theme is constantly recurring.
In all of my drawings I am enthralled with detail, not necessarily realism, but the intricacy of shapes using light and shadow.
I create worlds that exist only in the recesses of my mind. I want to draw the viewer into these worlds. At first glance, I hope one will see something familiar, but on closer examination realize that it is pure fantasy.
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