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 Yup. That’s me. Or. . .well, my idea of a self-portrait. At about 10 AM every morning I’m at my drawing board and feel like a mouse that’s consumed three times its body mass in Peet’s coffee: I’m wired. Happily, by virtue of some mysterious alchemy between electromagnetic conduction and a visual streak in my DNA chain all that jazzy energy makes its way onto paper. I grew up outside of New York City “with a paintbrush in my hand.” My father was a cubist painter and much of my school years were spent drawing comics in the classroom. Regular expeditions were made to Flax Art for strange sounding things like “gesso,” “ultramarine blue” and “cadmium red.” I couldn’t wait to get to the pen counter, my heart set on a new stash of India ink and watercolor supplies. I learned a number of things then: the rectangle is an important shape, rinse your brushes in something very different from your coffee cup, else one day you’ll end up gulping a mouthful of cold acrylic swill, and it’s always hard to know when a piece is finished. I got my B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic and then migrated to the West Coast, in search of what felt like some “intangible, infinite thing” – the openness of the vast Pacific landscape and California’s innovative spirit had a magnetic pull. I read voraciously, haunted art galleries, wrote film blurbs for the Pacific Film Archive. I was fascinated by visual storytelling and bookmaking. I worked as an editor and writer for over fifteen years and authored my first book, Talking Politics: Choosing the President in the Television Age (Praeger), a series of oral-history interviews with top television journalists such as Tom Brokaw, Larry King and Robin MacNeil.
When you write for children you write for one of the most keen and open-minded audiences in the world. I now feel I have found that “intangible, infinite thing” I so sought when I came west, in the daily practice of putting pen and pigment to paper, whether it be a mad-dashed cartoon or an evocative landscape. My drawings have been exhibited at a variety of venues including I am also active in the field of education as the founder of KurtHahn.org, a Web archive devoted to Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound. My husband and I make our home in the San Francisco Bay area with our dog Zack. |
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But it wasn’t until that first book came out that I realized what I really wanted to do was write and illustrate books for children - the grace and simplicity of children’s books, of word and image working together to shape an entire world, this was where I wanted to devote my full energies. Since then I have devoted myself to this practice and I am even more fascinated now by the magic and mirth and deep meaning found in children’s books.