March 25, 2011: Creativity or Chaos?

I often heard my mother observe that my father's rolltop desk was "so messy." He would always respond, "But I know where everything is!" As a curioius pre-schooler, I was fascinated with this forbidden jumble of rolled up blueprints, mysterious slips of paper, small pads and notebooks, and the crowning jewel - a ball point pen standing upright in a holder! I longed to write with that pen just as I saw my father do. And how I wanted to open those little drawers and poke in the cubbyholes and pull out all those sheets of paper. As you can see by this photo, I somehow made it up to the promised land, and it was just the beginning of my passion for the power of lines on paper.

March 10, 2010: Old Lady Under a Hill

When I was little, I was fascinated by the nursery rhyme, "There was an old lady who lived under a hill...and if she's not gone, she lives there still." I was intrigued by the possibility of a mysterious old woman who lived in a cozy little cavehouse. I wanted to go visit her! Unfortunately, on our flat farmland, our only "hill" was a slight slope behind two old apple trees. In early spring, my favorite walk was to this spot to see green grasses emerging from tangled brown stalks. If you listened carefully you could hear the hill bubbling and snapping with new life. "Ohio House 1", colored pencil on paper, explores my lifelong feelings for hills in early spring - and the elusive old lady who might live there still.