May The Devil Take You, oil on gessoed paper, 11" x 15"; April 2012.
The scent of leather and oil and the rumble of the machine will be irresistible. The Muse and her sidekick will take you for a ride. Sunscreen a necessity. No need for matches.
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Moonlight Toad, 12" x 15" Oil on gesssoed paper. 2005 (?). The piece was created as an advertisement for my work in the Picture Book directory and recently sold at IlluXCon.
My agent suggested that I try my hand at anthropomorphizing a few of my favorite animals to see if I could make a transition into the narrative side of the children’s market. Aside from medical illustration, opportunities to work in hard science illustration were becoming…
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Off stage, Mickey and the gang are just bad boys. The Boys’ Club, 2010. 12" x 12" graphite on vellum.
One of 40 drawings I made for my thesis exhibition, the focus of each of the images was to subvert or disentangle the meaning of a particular story, fairy tale, or cultural mythology. In this case, I decided to have some fun with the reputation of a rather sacred cow, er… rodent….
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Wonderbread Madonna, 30” x 36”, oil on canvas. 2007.
Started in 2003 while I was still at YCP, I didn’t get the impetus to finish this piece until my first year of grad school in 2007. I’m not sure why it languished in my studio for a few years. Sometimes the Muse is off wandering in the desert (I like to think she was at a jazz festival in Palm Springs).
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Delta G, 18” x 24”h, oil on canvas. 2002.
I created a group of paintings during the early 2000s which I lumped together in a group I called “Contested Bodies”. It was my way of processing a lot of what I was getting in my feminist thought classes…
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Airless, 18” x 24”h, oil on canvas. 2002.
This image was inspired by a poem by Adrienne Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law. The line that so struck me goes like this: “She shaves her legs until they gleam like petrified mammoth tusk.” It speaks about the habits and traditions given to us from our mothers, behaviors we’d barely questioned or given a passing thought…
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Pyracantha,oil on alkyd-treated museum board. Apprx. 15” x 20”.
At the time, I was living in a city neighborhood and a there was a huge, glorious specimen of this shrub growing two doors up the street from me…
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The Himba Dragon Cooks, oil on canvas, 36" x 40"; 2013.
Author, Bill Johnson, had a great idea for a book: to ask artists to contribute art with an imagined smaller story line that was not specified in the author’s writing. Essentially, to add a mini-drama idea within the broader story. This not only gave the artists a whole lot more flexibility to create really cool paintings of women! dragons! and dogs! but it also allowed the artists to become co-creators in the story…
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“The Meeting”, 40” x 36” oil on canvas, 2011.
At the end of IlluXCon 2010, where I was an exhibitor, I heard through the grapevine that author, Bill Johnson, was looking to commission fantasy artists for an upcoming glossy, hardback, high quality art book, heavy on imagery. The story involves the women of an alternate Earth-like world needing to come together to prevent an ecological disaster.
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Natural History, oil in gessoed paper, 17” x 18”. 1999.
It’s a piece that has more of a formal design presentation with lots of natural light; quite different from the jumble and “messy” space of the “Shadows” painting I did a year later. To create this image, I set up a small table near a window in my studio and appointed the space with books, insect mounts, a skull…
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Flesh For Ichthyes, 18” x 22” graphite on Arches paper. 2012.
Part of a group of images that I affectionately called my “Revenge Series”, this image also contains the idea of multiples. Sometime in late grad school, I started to think more about how certain species of birds, fish, insects, behave as one entity…
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Shadows, 18” x 24”, oil on canvas, 2000.
A black cat lounges in her mistress’s workshop full of herbs, bell, book, and candle, a pentagram, and few tarot cards foretelling of a fine partnership. Where is the Witch, though? Don’t turn around, she’s right behind you. Have you been snooping where you’re not supposed to be?
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Garden of the Blue Dragon, oil on treated Arches, mounted to cradled hardboard; 36” x 24”. 2018.
This image marks a turning point in my work where I’m beginning to fold my fantasy ideas into “real” botanical work. And what seemed to be a natural counterpart to the bump-out —which I’d been using for decades— is the “carve out”.
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Just Doing My Job, 18” x 24”, oil on board. 2013. (Available as a print.)
Storytelling is always a challenge to get right. Put too much info into the piece and you’ve put the meaning on with a frontloader. Always better to let your audience put some of the pieces together and maybe fill some of it in with their imagination.
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Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, 15” x 18”, oil on gessoed papoer. 2010.
The machines/ aliens that come to Earth in the story really have nothing to do with the newborn but I liked the idea of conflating parts of the story by encasing the baby in the weird machine, cyborg-like, screaming in its caul. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had painting was smearing the pigment and oil over the face…
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Occupation, oil on canvas, 26” x 32”, 2003.
This painting was a direct response to my experience of taking an Ecology course during undergrad. One of those things was that ecologists can calculate a population’s growth over a period of time. It’s a formula that takes into consideration how many females of a species are in a given area…
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Gevurah, 22” x 30 graphite on Arches paper. 2011.
Occasionally, an idea for a piece comes out of left field and I just have to deal with it. This was one of those. I was researching the Kabbalah because I find ancient esoteric belief systems to be fascinating and I became quite interested with this complex system which breaks the Judaic godhead into….
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Joy Ride, 28” x 28”, oil on canvas, 2011.
What happens when you imagine the witch, Baba Yaga, as a normal elderly person behaving in predictable ways? So what does she do with her down time between luring children to her hut and fattening them up to eat? I imagined that she might tear around the forest on her chicken-legged hut, house dress flapping, just for the fun of it.
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Ephemerata, 28” x 28”, July 2013
There were a few courses I took in ecological studies while I was an undergrad where learned about the fascinating “ephemerata” of streams. Lab/ field trips were great fun: wade into a stream, put out a net and kick over a few rocks. Try not to get knocked over by the current. Don’t touch any of the hairy vines on the trees.
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The Rusalka, 18” x 24”, oil on hardboard, 2012.
Even though I was given the go-ahead for the “Rusalka” cover, I completed an alternative cover too because I was certain that if the publisher saw this idea completed, he’d go bananas for it instead.
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