“My muses”
The primary motivation for me as an artist is the creative process itself. I just like making something, anything, and I have been trying to make something for years. It was not my intention to have a career as an artist, nor did I even have any exposure to original art, galleries, or museums as a child growing up. However, my grandmother, for whatever reasons, gave me a student art kit and I dabbled at painting. My original attempts got hung up in our house, with no concept as to whether or not they were fair to good compositions. When I graduated from high school, my career intention was to be a veterinarian. That didn’t happen but I did enroll in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. I fumbled and dabbled my way through two years of visual arts, left to get married, and then returned after a few years to college as a single parent. Since graduating from university with two degrees, I have lived in New Brunswick, then Maine, and have had various jobs from teaching high school art and English to being self employed. Throughout the moves, job changes, life changes, I have always kept dabbling in the arts.
My muses over the years has been Nature: primarily the ever changing moods, colors and power of nature presented through the visuals of skies, from the prairies to the Maine coast line . Since seeing an article in a National Geographic magazine regarding the discovery of sunken cargo from the bottom of the China Sea which showed numerous examples of fine pottery, which was still intact but covered with barnacles and sea creatures, I have been enthralled with altering clay vessels and raku firing them to capture this same phenomenon that took Nature 100’s of years to create and I can replicate in a few weeks. I have other muses but these ones are a little more personal and I find it difficult to share and discuss. I prefer to let the work communicate and stand on its own.