My ideas come to me in the making of the piece. Part of their charm comes from the tension between sweet and not so sweet. They are fairytales and characters from tales that I've imagined.
I live and work on a small farm in rural western Pennsylvania with my husband and an assortment of animals, but I grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York and spent most of my adult life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My roots are in the fine art world. I earned degrees from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. I majored in painting but soon after graduating began experimenting with figurative painted wood wall sculpture.To support myself, I worked at a Boston gallery repairing large papier-maché and metal animal sculpture. The work was very exacting and I was pretty obsessive about it. This was where I developed many of the skills that I use in my work today. I have been a full time studio artist since 1995 and have been exhibiting at major craft shows and galleries since then.
My pieces are made from wood planks (primarily basswood and poplar) and various other materials. I use a bandsaw to cut out the shapes, a large disk/belt sander to do the initial shaping and hand and rotary tools to carve and detail. I like a really smooth surface so I do a lot of hand sanding. My pieces are all made without a pattern and are painted meticulously in water based paints. I use Italian (maimari polycolors) and Japanese (turner neo colors) acrylics and acryla gouache because the colors mix cleanly, are beautiful and are matte. I draw the details with pencil and seal and finish the piece with matte varnish.
