It was a wonderful, funky place to live, even if a little depressing because of all the gray days. The sun rarely made appearances there all winter long, and my work was appropriately gray and brooding. Unemployment was very high in western NY State back then, and even though Phil kept us afloat by working at a rather tedious office job, we lived pretty much hand-to-mouth. I expressed a general bleakness in my dolls that was in the air at that time. My work grew quite dark and cloistered. 

Because of the mood of my work, I was a frequent buyer at the local Goodwill's and the Salvation Army to find the right tweeds, prints, and textures from old clothes to use for the figures.(All that time I spent at Goodwill and the Salvation Army Thrift Store also presented a hazard to our financial health, since I then embarked on my lifelong journey of collecting various and sundry junk and antiques-- but that is another story.)

The creation of these soft people was something I did in a little bedroom studio in a dark apartment on the north side of Buffalo. I spent morning, afternoon, and evening creating faces, combing fabrics, painting eyeballs, and adding small details that would bring these characters to life. I found that it was the small touches that lent authenticity to the characters I was trying to create. For a spell I even did a series of street people and bag ladies. I wrote tiny stories or vignettes about each character. In essence the dolls were an extension of the puppets, but without actual performance. The performance was to be imagined in the head of the person who bought them. 

During the years I made the puppets and soft figures I was lucky to receive a lot of positive attention. I won awards, and had lots of support through newspaper reviews, write-ups and sales to the public. Gallery owners all over the country asked me to exhibit in shows. One southern museum even bought a piece. And I participated and won “Best of Show” in a juried exhibit sponsored by Cotton Incorporated that traveled all over the US. It was a good time for making that kind of art and my ego was stroked all the time. And anyone who has ever gone to a university or college to study art knows that after four years of art professors, most artists can use a little ego stroking.




Flying Away Through the Cracks in the Clouds

Leaving Buffalo changed the style of my work. When we moved away, the sun began to shine, our spirits lifted, color started to appear on my dolls, and I felt less of a need to develop character as much as just play with cloth, paint, threads,texture and brighter hues. And that is the trend I continued with. I ended up dyeing all my own fabric and painting all the patterns myself. I used a lot of textile surface embellishment with threads and fabric techniques like quilting and trapunto. By the time I was close to no longer making the figures at all, I found myself working in bright, hot pink, turquoise, and rich reds. I was painting all my own fabrics and using patterns and wild stencils. Gesture and color was my focus. Surface decoration was key. The figures flattened out and took on the effect of drawings.

At the time I was choosing to wrap up my career as a fiber artist, shortly after we moved to Boston, one of my students and friends was Pacita Abad, whom I taught the skill and art of painting on fabric and then stuffing and quilting for added dimension. She was especially interested in the trapunto technique which I employed quite a bit in my figures and wall hangings. She went on to take her lovely primitive style paintings of life in the Philippines and blow them up to create large scale quilts using the methods I showed her. It was a fun time in my life when Pacita, and two other friends and I got together weekly to just paint and discuss art.

I guess it was very natural that I then made the transition to working in two dimensions, since I was painting more and more on the dolls. And since the dolls themselves were very narrative, it made perfect sense that illustration was what I really wanted to do more than anything else. 

Back to Two Dimensions But It Was Still the Same Cast of Characters

Since becoming an illustrator meant putting together a portfolio of art, and pounding the pavement, I eased myself out of doll making and fiber arts, and focused entirely on drawing and painting. My goal was getting work as an illustrator.

As it turned out, the kind of stuff I started drawing and painting was pretty much the same characters I had created as puppets and dolls. And I tended to use paint and other media in the same way I used dyes, fabrics and threads. It was just that it ended up on paper. 

I took about six months to just sit and paint and have enough pieces to take around looking for artwork. I started to go around and show it all to art directors and art editors. I made phone calls. I walked all over town with my portfolio. I made a trip to NY. The kids’ publishers told me my work was very good for editorial publishing. The editorial art directors told me my work was perfect for kids’ books. Ultimately, my first work was in magazines and newspapers, because the art was a touch on the edgy side. 

And that is how I became an illustrator.

Thank you to the late Stan McCray at Boston Magazine for giving me my first real assignments and seeing the potential in my work. In that forum, and at the now defunct Ultrasport, I really developed into an illustrator. 

I ended up doing a lot of work for many magazines and newspapers all over the US.

Over the years, and after becoming a Mom, my work grew less edgy with fewer dark characters. I started going in the direction of children’s books more, since I was reading a lot of them and enjoying myself very much doing it. Now, that is mostly what I do, because I love books more than anything. And now I write about the characters again, in addition to just making them.

Hey! I Know You!

It was very helpful to put this history into words. I guess I never thought about how consistent my aesthetic sensibility is. I couldn’t change what I like to do if I tried. The puppets are very much present in the stories I illustrate now. And the characters I draw now, lived and breathed as small performers up on our puppet stage of old, or they sat around at Rhinebeck and watched 50,000 fair visitors stroll by.

I have even begun to paint on canvas again--something I haven’t done since college. Naturally I just paint the people who were puppets, dolls, and book characters. Doesn’t matter if it’s behind a miniature curtain, stuffed with cotton, or on paper or canvas. Everybody is there. The men and women of Buffalo and other similar characters from before and after--then and now.

Oh, and remember that nasty habit I mentioned? You know, the habit of scouring the thrift shops and antiques center for priceless junk? I still do it. I can even do it twenty-four hours a day , thanks to eBay. Of course the good part is that I can afford it more now. But the better part is that I live surrounded by it and it --the junk--shows up in my art work all the time right alongside everything else. 

So in the end, it’s all the same: Same people, same world, same priceless junk and details. That’s who I am and that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. 

And if you want to enjoy being an artist, discover what your story is and live it through your art.

O.K., now once more with feeling:

“Every artist dips his brush into his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."

“Art isn’t about validating yourself, as much as recognizing yourself.”


Nuff said. Now go make your art.