1. Why have you decided to become an artist? Was there a defining moment in your life when you knew you were an artist?
You don’t really decide to be an artist. You decide on your medium, your technique, your subject matter, etc., but if making art is how you come to understand the world and process your experiences, you’re an artist, whether you’re good or not. You’re born that way. I knew from childhood that making art was the only activity I thought mattered. In high school it was a toss-up whether I would become a writer or a painter because I won prizes for both. I went to Brown to train as a writer but also took their art curriculum. At Brown, they did not teach me how to write or paint but what was acceptable Modernist subject matter and approach, both as a writer and as a painter, and I rebelled against that because I didn’t share their values. Their criticisms dried me up as a writer for 30 years, but I still got visions, so I could still paint. That is why I became a painter.
2. What’s your background? Do you have a formal art education or are you self taught?
I have a formal art education and I am self-taught.
3. What’s the most important or most memorable advice you’ve been given about either your creation techniques or in marketing yourself?
There are many art worlds. Find your people. It does not matter how good you get if what you want your work to achieve does not match what the art world values. You have to find the art world that values what you want your work to achieve. Before Instagram, finding your art world was a very difficult thing. On Instagram, once I found artists I liked, I started following people who they followed if I liked their work, and that led me to whole worlds I didn’t know existed.
4. What’s your clearest memory from your childhood?
A shaft of light on a white oak floor, a parallelogram of gold against the grey-blue shadow, and I think to myself, “Today I’m three.”
5. What themes do you find most interesting?
In my family, who I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to do for a living, who I was supposed to marry, where I was supposed to live, all my beliefs and values, everything that was to make up my identity had already been dictated to me, and it was not a fit. Even after I left the family, I found that given my gender, class and race, society imposed all these expectations of me, of my values and my behavior, that didn’t fit. I wasn’t that person and I didn’t want to twist myself to become someone else’s idea of who I should be. To figure out my identity, I have had to invent the wheel, so to speak. I realize that every piece I’ve ever painted, whether they’re paintings of people or animals or landscapes, they have all been tools to find out who I am and what can I be. One of the most important pieces I’ve ever done is a triptych painted at 23: the archetypes Virgin, Madonna, and Whore, that were imposed on me from without, and I had to pick who would I be. Then over the years, making my living in technology, I needed balance from nature, so I painted animals — what does the coyote have to teach me? The sparrow? I journeyed in, became the coyote, became the sparrow, saw the world through their eyes, came out changed. When I got older, what do the trees have to teach me, the mountains? Older still, does the archetype of crone fit? I tried it on, pretty limiting! But I journeyed in and came out the other side. Now I ask one of the same questions I’ve been asking all my life: who do I want to be as a woman? Clint Eastwood spent his entire life making film after film exploring what it means to be a man and what kind of man he wanted to be. But who is doing that for women? There are so few images of who and what a woman can be if she is to be self-actualized, balanced in anima and animus, not an object onto which men’s fears and desires are projected but an adult with her own agenda. When I was a teenager I needed a female role model and there were none. I have since seen women in popular culture who I would call “lesser men,” and that’s not an answer to me either. What would a female role model look like? What is a female hero? A blend of hard and soft. What do I value now and what do I wish I had as a role model when I was young? Bowie’s question: “Who can I be now?”
6. Who is your favorite artist?
Ah! That changes almost daily. Of painters, Daniel Sprick, Mitch Griffiths, François Bard, Dozier Bell, Aleah Chapin, Isaak Levitan, Will St. John, Colleen Barry, Dino Valls. But over my life this has been a cast of hundreds. That said, some of the most important artists to me have been David Bowie and Bob Dylan. Both refused to let others define them. Both tried on numerous identities for size and proved you can get away with anything as long as you do it with style. Both tried to use their work to make their audiences think, to question their values, to change the world. And both relentlessly experimented, for decades, endured long periods when the experiments failed and their work was disparaged, yet they hung in there and continued to produce interesting, beautiful and relevant work throughout their lives. They’re brave and tenacious. I keep coming back to these guys, over and over. They are my real role models.
7. What jobs have you done other than being an artist?
A better question might be what jobs have I not done? I have done innumerable different kinds of jobs in order to survive. What lasted longest was my 25 years as software engineer. I chose this field because software is something the larger culture values, and when I went into it there was enough of a shortage of engineers that they would actually hire women and pay them a living wage.
8. What memorable responses have you had to your work?
The most memorable responses I received were to the Thoughtcrime series of paintings and essays I did in the late 1990s and posted on the Internet. In this series, I created a number of memes before Internet memes existed, and they were designed to challenge societal constraints about women’s roles. For this I got a number of death threats, but I also received enthusiastic letters from young women who were incredibly grateful that they had found someone who felt the same way. Essentially I had given them the courage to walk their own paths. It doesn’t get any better than that.
9. Where do you find inspiration?
Usually in the bathroom, when I’m taking a shower. That’s where I get most of my visions. Glibness aside, I get a lot of my ideas — the conceptual underpinnings — from film and popular music. As to technical inspiration, I might look at another painter and admire how they handled composition or shapes or how they rendered, but I see these technical qualities as tools and not an end, and they never inspire a work. If I admire how they’ve handled both concept and execution, as I do for instance with Aleah Chapin or Daniel Sprick, they’ve grabbed that territory so by definition I can’t emulate their work, but I can emulate their approach. This is why I like to get my inspiration from different media other than painting, because then I have to translate the idea to painting. My ideas are always conceptual, and often they come out of reading. Gender studies, media studies, the news, anything that gets me thinking. A vision may crystallize the concept, and then I’ll look for image sources to back up my vision. I like best to take photos and work from them but often I can’t so I’ll grab images from films or internet searches and use so many that I’m not really copying any of them.
10. What do you think are your strongest abilities contributing to the success of your work?
I have strong conceptual underpinnings and long and varied life experiences. My work has real depth and asks questions that matter. Every piece is designed to touch both the lightness and the shadow of your own psyche. Every piece is designed so you will read it differently in different moods, at different times of your life. I paint for people who enjoy work that makes them both feel and think.
11. What role do you think the artist has in today’s society?
From Cesar A. Cruz: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” This job of the artist is a sacred mission.
12. What couldn’t you do without?
Silence. A place where I can be myself. An intelligent friend with whom I can ask questions that matter. Truth. Integrity. Honor. The love and support of my two best friends, one of whom is my husband. Somewhere to get my artwork seen, so it can affect the world.
