I grew up in a household filled with art. My father and grandfather were both painters and I lived in two different artist communities. Everyone we knew was either an artist or a writer. It was a harsh reality to realize, upon growing up, that, in fact, the world does not revolve around Gallery Openings and Studio visits. 

The art that hung on my walls was never decoration. I studied the paintings to make sense of my life. What was my father thinking about when he painted those strange clouds? Why did the mountain rocks appear to look like old men's faces? I studied the paintings for clues. I think I became a visual thinker because of the vast amount of visual stimulus in my home. The art was alive for me. 

Today my home is also filled with art. Some of it is mine but a lot of it comes from art my husband and I have collected over the years. I like our furniture, I like our accumulations of objects we have collected. But it is the art that I value most of all. The art turns our walls into something vital. The sculpture transforms a shelf, it lives and breathes from where it sits.

I am grateful for growing up in an art-filled house. The art shaped me and gave me access to the world of the imagination.

While I love to write, I have a difficult time writing about my art and finding titles that I like. I can easily tell the story visually but I find it more challenging to find words for them. With my Fashionable Portrait series, I find phrases from the fashion magazines I cut apart. I like finding these random phrases. I have a box with text snippets that I glance through, looking for just the right one.

I have lately started pulling phrases from Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse. It is a favorite book of mine, and offers brilliant fragments. My collages often seem like poems to me. They are snippets of a story, not the whole story. In this way, their titles too need to have a bit of poetry to them.

"It Started With the Snow"