About the Artist
Bio
THE GIRL WHO MISTOOK THE SUN FOR A TANGERINE
THE GIRL WHO MISTOOK THE SUN FOR A TANGERINE
Education and Fellowships:
: Rhode Island School of Design, BFA. 1997, Advanced Standing and Honors
: Vermont Studio Center (artist Grant each time): March-April 2002;
March- April 2004; March- April 2006; March- April 2008
: Ragdale Institute, Chicago, Fellow, (offered but not taken)
: Center For Contemporary Artists, North Adams, MA, February, 2006
: Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Fellow), January-February 2002, January-Feburary 2004.
: Mary Anderson Center (Indiana) May -June and September-October 2003, November- December, 2005.
: The Hambidge Center (Georgia) October-December 2003, again offered (but not taken ) for 2007
:The Woodstock Guild (Byrdclyffe Arts Colony) Fellow, June 2002 and June 2003.
: Anderson Ranch Arts Center, landscape painting, August, 2001.
: Palette and Chisel Arts Club, (Artist and Fellow), Chicago, Illinois, 2014-2017
ADDITIONAL STUDIES AND HONORS
: Listed in Marqui’s “who’s Who in America”(since 2005 ) and
“who’s who of American Women” (since 2004.)
: Selected Works Archived in a continuing collection in
the National Museum for Women in the Arts since 2002.
: Works now in public collections ( Vermont Studio Center and mary Anderson Center):
Also in numerous private collections including collections in San Francisco, Maryland,
Grosse Pointe, MI; Vermont, Connecticut, new York City; Boston; Georgia; Chicago; Virginia;
Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.
: Independent study in Malaysia and Indonesia, January and Febuary, 1995
: Chautauqua Institute, Summer Artists Residency, Chautauqua, N.Y., 19
THE GIRL WHO MISTOOK THE SUN FOR A TANGERINE
THE GIRL WHO MISTOOK THE SUN FOR A TANGERINE
THE GIRL WHO MISTOOK THE SUN FOR A TANGERINE
My first love is not art but life. People, images, and ideas, excite my world and I want to create just because I feel that the world I see is brimming with life, all around me. I love a rainy day, I love music, I love confusion and chaos, I love a sun so bright that you have to take a break in the shade. I love the eyes of my subject, and I cant say I have ever gotten to know anyone I haven’t found beautiful. I love to sculpt with both hands in The clay, I love to capture flowers in a symphony of color as if they were all notes, and sometimes I just love a simple sketch that seems to be light and carry some sort of melody, some kind of shape of things, big noises, small ones. I like to paint my paintings like I am raining down on the canvas, like even when the paint dries, they still look wet and fresh, as if seen through a wet windowpane.
I work out of choas. Always, I have a million ideas in my head, and I work out of the spontenaiety in my studio that chaos affords. Lately I have been working with models, a lot. It helps to decide on the spot how to pose them, what they will be doing, with different improvised props, outfits, and backgounds that form a narrative. This provides relief from my more serious composite paintings that do in upstairs studio. And from my figure sculptures, where the clay smells so much like chocolate ( the plasticine) that I have to keep an extra supply on hand while I am working! I find the synergy of working on all three- composite / landscape/abstact/flower compositions with my model work in the garage studio has a sort of synergy to it- if I’m down on one, I do the other. It keeps me always fueled, like a sort of Picasso, except for, I’m just trying to be ME!
STUDIO
The Lemon Tree
There was a tree, yes, a tree trunk with its trunk split and then rejoined before the major branches went off ( it was a fruit tree, my love) and anyhow this trunk, at the bottom, was split and rejoined in the exact arc in the symmetry only nature knows in that of a mobius strip.
It was not of a fiddlers or whittelers carvingg but that of ñature herself, exact in its never ending and rejoining curve as the unique structure of a crystal snowflake whose one half joins the other. Save from the negative space this arc produced there was a straight or somewhat straight ( it was, after all, a fruit tree, best beloved) trunk again from which the thicker brickerery branches produced armfuls of lemons. They fell to the ground in yellow spots o n the dark shady earth if they were not picked, you see.
And what blossoms in springtime! The white petals would snow in the wind against a greenish sunny sky…..when the wind picked up when they were released from flowerdom, best beloved.
That is the spot, my dear, where not only you and I may think up to remember in our minds, but in fact, where anyone can go.
And through the keyhole of the mobius strip of a trunk could be seen a great vista of green fields with white windmills across the somewhat small bay of water, best beloved, where our sailboat is set tied to a pier that only you and I may go on- unless you can find someone braver than you or I, my love.
That sailboat has a prow of a cross like a cucifix- if you can imagine faith for me for a minute- and to sail on this boat is to become Jesus walking on water, which only he could do, my dear, but if you want to practice you can walk in puddles, or float with your I-Boom on the great salt sea.
This boat has proud white sails, a bow which is what they call the front of the boat, a stern, like all things we know are stren, sits behind the boat as she kneels at the waves whene her great white sails are full as clouds. That is, best beloved, when we leave the land for more unstable ground.
There is a port to the left side of the boat and a starboard to its right- that's what we call the sides, port like liqour poured in wine and starboard like the milky way.
And when we set sail, we go where the wind tells us, best beloved, and when we change tack ( that means course) we shout, ‘ hard to the Lee!’ ( and that is, of course, when we shift the other thing called bow connected to the mast) ( which steers the direction of the sails as they dip from one direction into the drink or the other) and we, of course, lean towards the direction of the curve, or the wind)
And what does this have to do with the lemon tree in the lemon orchards on land?
We take the sour lemons with us to stay well and season our fish with, as well as the bucket we brought to collect water to drink from the straws we brought, best beloved, and you can even make lemonade with sugarcubes on board, as you wish.
The mobius is the key that gets us there, and the porthole the wind whistles through to call us back to dry land. You have to turn your I boom off to hear it, the land calling you back, or us, you see.