Over time, what’s been most important for me has been to find my own voice. And then trust and follow it, even in the face of recurring self-doubt. I think artist voices are like fingerprints, each unique in its own way. That’s why I’m so curious about other’s work: it reveals their experience and worldview.
As the world becomes
more complex, I find that visual approaches help me communicate with
people of vastly different backgrounds.
As the world becomes
more complex, I find that visual approaches help me communicate with
people of vastly different backgrounds.
I have a passion for sketching people, especially live human subjects. Aside from community classes in my youth, a couple freshman-level introductory classes in college, and a handful of courses here at CHAW, I’m self-taught and over the years have spent hours upon hours filling sketchbooks. One of my favorite pastimes is taking my sketchbook and pen to a coffee shop to draw fellow patrons, or quickly capturing other commuters’ poses/essences when riding on Metro/bus.
When I arrived at college, escaping West Virginia, yay!, I was an oblivious 17-year-old. I joined a curriculum that was really training, indoctrination, attack therapy, and an artifact of 1930s pedagogy: architecture school.
My first artistic attempts at capturing my children with a camera were not as satisfying as I wanted them to be, so I signed up for photography classes at CHAW. I liked it so much, I returned for more classes and eventually obtained a Master’s in New Media Photojournalism from the Corcoran.
I compare my pieces to political cartoons, but with textiles and buttons rather than pen and
paper. Each of my hangings tells a story, describes an experience, or illustrates the double
standards of which we are all guilty.
I was not one of those kids in high school who was into photography. You know, the
kids who knew about cameras and darkrooms. Had I not stumbled into majoring in art history at
Yale, I wonder if I would have ever thought to take a course in photography. Because I had no
background in studio art, photography appealed to me as the so-called “royal road to drawing”,
something a gazillion people have likewise thought, ever since the nineteenth century.
I went home and told my aunts, who were REAL artists. They told me to paint what I wanted AND gave me better brushes.