About
| I have been making art all my life. I’m told that my first word was a version of pencil. “TaTa” was the more easily pronounced name I assigned to the slender wand that was wood and lead and magical. I delighted in lending color, depth, and furious scribbles to my Mother’s damask wallpaper, much to her dismay. I have no formal training, believing that since I already was an artist, there was no need to attend art school – a decision that I have since questioned. I went to a liberal arts college and studied abroad in Provence through Sarah Lawrence, a program that is now run by the Savannah College of Art and Design. I moved to New York, working both in advertising and gallery management. I freelanced as a model, a job which included posing for three wonderful artists, Tom Wesselman, Will Barnet, and Duane Michals. I took classes at the Art Student’s League, the School of Visual Arts, and worked at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Studio. I moved to China in 1990 with my husband and two small children in tow. It was there that I was introduced to a group of artists called The New Literati. Tired of propaganda painting and “art serving politics”, they sought to create a new social atmosphere through simple depictions of everyday life. Working with traditional techniques and materials, they rendered contemporary images and concerns, and often infused their work with poetry. I studied with Zhu Xinjian, who patiently taught me the magic of ink and gouache on rice paper, and how to mount them as scrolls. The influence of these artists on my work was enormous. They taught me that less is often more, a lesson that I am still learning. I currently divide my time between studios in Chicago and Maine, and am working with a variety of mediums. |
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